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Vigilance
A Defence of British Liberty

By Ashley Mote

Publication: April 2001
Paperback - £12.95
pp 279
ISBN: 0-9540124-0-2

INTRODUCTION

One day this controversial and provocative book may be banned.  British freedom of speech will have been abolished.  Some people think the United Kingdom has effectively been abolished already, as a result of endless interference in British affairs by the European Union.  

As author Ashley Mote writes, “In 1975, as new members of the EEC, we thought we were voting for a free trade area.  What we have today is an undemocratic, unaccountable police state which makes laws behind closed doors and seeks by stealth to destroy the UK as an independent nation.  The European Union is being increasingly rammed down British throats in pursuit of a dream we never voted for.  That dream has become a living nightmare.  Silent discontent is no longer an option.”

Vigilance is written for people who are concerned about the activities of the EU, its impact on the British way of life, and who want to know more.  It is not a book about politics in the usual sense.  Nor is it academic.  It is a simple, clear and horrifying account of what is being done to our country by the EU, why it matters, and why it must be stopped.  As the author says, ultimately, the EU issue is about liberty itself. 

Vigilance also paints a vivid picture of the thriving, wealthy, confident and outward-looking Britain that can quickly emerge from the ruins of the EU disaster.

The book may be ordered direct from all good bookshops.  It may also be ordered direct from the distributors.  Full details are on web-site: www.author.co.uk/vigilance  

Pre-release reviews:  
“This is a tremendous book. I hope it will reach a wide audience – and not just amongst the British.”  “An immensely readable book – a must for everyone who cares about this country.”  
 “A great book.”   
“What an indictment of the European Union – a real horror story”

About the author:  Ashley Mote is an award-winning author, former journalist and businessman.  Vigilance is his seventh book, and his second about the EU.  He has been an active anti-EU campaigner for many years.  

CHAPTERS

Acknowledgements	
Introduction
Clearing the Smokescreen
It’s the Principle of the Thing…
Don’t Look Back
Political Muddy Waters
Economic Realities
The Business of Business is Business
We, the People
Back to the Future
Appendix – Defence of the Realm
Index

EXTRACTS

	French President Charles de Gaulle understood the British perhaps better than we understood ourselves when he vetoed the UK’s application to join what was then the Common Market, in 1963: “England, in effect is insular. She is maritime. She is linked through her trade, her markets, her supply lines to the most distant countries. She pursues essentially industrial and commercial activities and only slightly agricultural ones. She has, in all her doings, very marked and very original habits and traditions. In short England’s nature, England’s structure, England’s very situation differs profoundly from those of the Continentals.”
	Europe is – and always has been – moving in a different direction. Its idea of democracy is not our idea. In Europe, government by bureaucracy has been the norm for generations. The electorates in most European countries have been largely impotent for centuries. They are used to the idea that unelected bureaucrats run their affairs. 
	On the other hand, British parliamentary democracy was based on the idea that representation mattered at least as much as legislation. The passing of new laws was intended to follow debate and discussion, and a search by elected representatives for genuine understanding of the needs of the people who elected them. That was the intention, and the practice, at least until recent times.
	Even today, it is still true that:

In Britain the state is the servant of the individual.  In Europe the individual is the servant of the state.

In Britain all people are free to do all manner of things unless forbidden by law.  In Europe no person is free to do anything unless permitted by law.

In Britain our parliament, and the party that forms the government of the day, draws its power from the electorate, to whom it is fully accountable. The electorate can throw the parliament and the government out and elect another.  Every minister must answer for his own and his department’s actions at any time.  Every word spoken in parliament is recorded verbatim and published immediately for all to see.  All legislators and law enforcers are themselves subject to the full rigour of the law. No parliament may bind its successors. No parliament may legislate to limit or prejudice the rights and freedoms of the electorate.

In the EU (and much of Europe) none of these things is true. There, parliaments are at arms-length from their executives. Ministers do not have to answer for themselves or their departments. No verbatim records of proceedings are published. Law enforcers are not accountable for their actions under the law.

	So there is a curiously simple dichotomy here. The founding fathers of the EU assumed that it was necessary to write down how it shall operate. That is, and always has been, the Continental way of doing things. Once started on that road, however, they and successive generations of bureaucrats have inevitably found comfort in writing everything down. Otherwise, if something was not written down it was not permitted. This foolish logic has ultimately obliged them to legislate on literally every speck of trivia, every possibility however remote, and every contingency. Thus, the EU’s directive on duck eggs contains 26,911 words! 
	Yet great truths can be simply stated. The Lord’s Prayer contains 56 words, the Ten Commandments required 297 words, Abraham Lincoln’s immortal Gettysberg address was about the same length, while the American Declaration of Independence – which created the most powerful nation the world has ever seen – took all of 1,300 words. 
	In the UK we have never written our constitution down, except in part, and then only when it proved necessary to clarify issues of great moment – Magna Carta and the Declaration and Bill of Rights. But the drafters of those great documents were clever and insightful enough to realise that the protection of rights did not require their definition. They established principles, not details.
	This may be only a simple difference between us, but it lies at the very root of our problems with the EU. As a result, an unbridgeable incompatibility exists between Anglo-Saxon government and the Continentals’ system based on Napoleonic and Justinian law.
	Speaking at a meeting in the House of Commons, in December 1999, the leading constitutional lawyer, Leolin Price QC, asked a meeting of euro-realists:  “How did we ever come voluntarily to join this most selfish, protectionist, secretive, inward-looking political body the free world has ever seen? It is an organisation which steadfastly fails to define any benefits it might have claimed for itself, and which defiantly ignores the injury and damage it does. From Brussels and Westminster we are now being governed by constitutional illiterates.”
	He was right, of course. So much so that, in recent years, when both the Belgian and French governments suspended parliamentary democracy and openly ruled by edict to meet the Maastricht criteria, hardly a word of protest was to be heard anywhere in Europe.
	Their parliaments and elected representatives were simply ignored, and nobody cared.
	The warning was there, right at the start, if only we had seen it. When the Treaty of Rome was signed in 1957 it was not actually signed by all six founding states. The ministers representing Germany, Italy and Holland signed blank pieces of paper, because the translations of the French original were not completed before the meeting broke up. Again, nobody cared.
	The charade that passes for democracy in the EU went even further in Denmark in 1993, when the Danes rejected the Maastricht Treaty. They were obliged to vote again, in a second referendum – and threatened with more – until they gave their government the pro-European result it wanted. It might have been a referendum, but – as in the Soviet Union in previous times – only one result was acceptable to their political leaders, and they would stop at nothing to get it.
	Despite Denmark’s constitution saying that sovereignty cannot be devolved to any other body, the second referendum went ahead.
	It was structured so that the Danes were asked to vote “yes” for four opt-outs to the Treaty. They did so. Then, afterwards, the result was interpreted by the government as a “yes” for the Treaty itself! They claimed that a “yes” to the opt-outs implied a “yes” to the Treaty in its revised form, while a “no” to the opt-outs was a “yes” to the Treaty in full. In other words, there was no way of voting “no”.
	The result, and the way the Danish government manipulated the result to give them the authority to ratify Maastricht, produced riots in the streets. Students barricaded themselves in EU-free zones and, for the first time in Danish history, Danish police fired at Danish citizens. 
	The government of Denmark and supporters of the “yes” campaign in the second referendum later admitted that they had lied to the people.
	What sort of democracy is that? The answer is very simple. That is European democracy. And these fundamental differences between Anglo-Saxon and European democracy should have sounded deafening alarm bells long ago on this side of the Channel. 
	The inescapable fact is that an unelected minority executive governs the fifteen countries of the EU today, and it is rampant. European hostility to the Anglo-Saxon system of democratic government is ingrained in Continental European culture, and it stems from their deep well of government by bureaucracy. It is their system, not ours, that rules the EU.
	Even the Council of Ministers is a mere fig leaf. It is not a single body. It functions by areas of responsibility, and draws together all the ministers from member states who are responsible for particular portfolios. So, for example, all the home affairs or interior ministers meet as a Council of Ministers. So do all the foreign ministers. And the agricultural ministers, and so on. There is no such thing as the Council of Ministers. There are as many as there are government portfolios. They meet rarely.
	But what happens when they do finally meet? The short answer is “very little”. These meetings are never in public, and are tantamount to political horse-trading behind closed doors. No advocacy and opposition, no proper debate on issues, no close examination of detailed draft legislation, and no verbatim record of proceedings. Not even a summary. Just a bland public announcement of the decisions taken. But virtually all those are taken by officials beforehand, not by ministers at all.
	One Conservative minister, writing about his first visit to an EU ministerial conference, remarked that on entering the conference chamber he was given a copy of the final communiqué. When he pointed out that the subjects had not yet been discussed he was told: “Oh no, sir, the decisions have already been made. You are here only to sign the communiqué.”
	There is a built-in assumption among European bureaucrats that the Anglo-Saxon system of accountable democracy will simply have to be abolished. It is in a minority, and must go. European politicians prefer to do things their way. 
	And what a way it is! In 1993, some fifty-seven French members of parliament (MPs) were under criminal investigation for corruption – a record even in Europe. The new president of the EU, Romano Prodi, was under investigation for corruption even before he took office. So far he has survived four separate fraud investigations in Italy – but the saga goes on to this day.
	So the European’s version of politics is not our version – in fact, it’s not politics at all. It is merely the bureaucratic administration of society and the economy – a system of patronage that positively encourages corruption. The process of argument and debate, of getting all the pros and cons out in the open, of risking dissent and inertia as part of the process of making the right decision and being seen to make it – these are anathema to European bureaucrats. 
	They want secrecy, not public debate, and no danger of their being held accountable afterwards – let alone losing their jobs. The differences between us are fundamentally about differences in our perception of the rule of law, the role of the nation state, and the ultimate freedom of the people – the freedom to choose, the freedom to do, say, and think what we like. The freedom to say no.
	Precisely because of this profound gulf between the British and Europeans over their respective perceptions of government, and the way it is conducted, it will be in Britain that this great debate about the nature of the EU will finally be resolved. The differences are greatest here, and so is the need to decide.
	
Vvvvv

	It has often been claimed that Winston Churchill was, or would have been, a supporter of a united Europe. There have even been suggestions that the EU would have had his support. Nothing is further from the truth. New (well, old, to be precise) evidence puts the lie on both claims.
	Speaking in the USA at the end of 1941, Churchill referred to:
	 “…comradeship in the common cause of great peoples who speak the same language and, to a very large extent, pursue the same ideals.
	“…by our sacrifice and daring our children shall not be robbed of their inheritance or denied the right to live in a free and decent world.”
	Just over a year later, in an inter-departmental note dated 14 February 1943, Winston Churchill wrote:
	“We have no right whatever to tie the hands of future Parliaments…I could not as Prime Minister be responsible…for binding my successor.” Those words were first published in The Hinge of Fate, Appendix F, p862.
	The next piece of evidence about Churchill’s thinking dates from some three months later. It comes from the notes of a meeting between the allied war leaders in Washington. During a conference to plan the next phase of the war as a whole, and the invasion of Sicily as a stepping-stone to Italy in particular, the group met regularly over several days.
	One of these meetings was over lunch at the British embassy on 22 May 1943. Roosevelt and Churchill were both present. During the luncheon, Churchill was invited to offer his views on a question which had hitherto not attracted much attention. However, it was now becoming clear that, eventually, the allies must win the war. The question was: “What happens afterwards?”
	Talking about the organisation of the post-war world, Winston Churchill expressed the wish that the whole of the British Empire (as it then was) and the USA should work together in a way which would confer advantages on both, but without what he called sacrifice or hindrance. A free association of sovereign and like-minded states was what he had in mind.
	He thought that the citizens of all these nations, which had Anglo-Saxon roots of one kind or another, should be able to settle and trade in freedom with each other. They should enjoy equal rights, but without losing sovereignty.
	He imagined some sort of common passport or visa, a common citizenship perhaps. He envisaged citizens of this large group of nations enjoying voting privileges in each other’s countries, subject to residential qualifications. They might also be eligible for public office in their new country of residence, subject of course to the laws and institutions of that country.
	He did not offer a fully developed plan – just a few principles and embryonic ideas. But his thinking was crystal clear. He had in mind a close but free association of countries based on culture, traditions and language, rather than one based merely on accidents of geography. 
	As for Europe, on that occasion at least, Churchill anticipated nothing more than a regional council – to pick up the pieces, ensure that the warring nations could not start a third conflagration, and to act as a single voice for a devastated continent in some sort of world forum. 
	He also suggested a similar regional council for the Pacific area. The seeds of the United Nations, NATO and the South East Asia Treaty Organisation (SEATO) can be found in this luncheon party.
	These ideas and quotations are important today for entirely new and different reasons. They demonstrate beyond reasonable doubt where Winston Churchill’s instincts lay, in terms of the sovereignty of nations, the traditions of Anglo-Saxon government, the potential collective strength of the Anglo-Saxon world, regardless of its distribution around the globe, and the desirability of creating some means of maximising that strength for the good of all.
	Even allowing for the profound changes that have occurred around the world and over the years, after half a century Churchill’s underlying message is undiminished. 
	Here is a clear and ringing reminder of where the great man stood. His words also set another goal further ahead still, if we have the collective will to strive for its modern equivalent.
	But his ideas on a common citizenship even within the Anglo-Saxon world are not likely to be popular today, especially after the extraordinary muddle the British government has got itself into with supposed EU citizenship.
	In mid-2000, the operations director of the passport agency was confirming that there was no such concept as “EU citizen”. By the autumn he was quoting the Maastricht Treaty, which says the opposite. He was unable to explain the contradiction, nor say which statement was correct.
	It was put to him: “Assuming for the moment that it does exist, you say that EU citizenship does not replace British citizenship (as you choose to call it). I never suggested it did. My objection is quite specific – I was born English, I live here, I remain English, and all the scraps of paper in the world cannot change that. I did not apply for, nor do I want, citizenship of any other nation, neither actual nor as the figment of some Eurocrat’s imagination. Nor will I have such a ludicrous concept imposed on me. I will come to my rights in a moment. 
	“I asked about the supposed ‘duties’ of EU citizens. What are they, precisely? How are they to be enforced? You ignored my question and tell me, instead, that citizenship confers four ‘special’ rights. Two I have already – the right to vote in elections here, and diplomatic protection abroad. One needs no reinforcement – the right to move abroad. The last is laughable – the right to appeal to the European Ombudsman. What does he know about English common law, pray?
	“But having answered a question I didn’t ask, I note that you have not answered any of the specific questions I did ask – namely:
	“1. How can the EU (a non-country) claim it can impose citizenship on me without my agreement? 
	“2. Where in law does the state take the right to create the notion that dual-citizenship is somehow compulsory?
	“3. Where in law does parliament claim sovereignty over my birthrights?
	“4. Given the terms of the oath sworn by the monarch at her coronation, and the oaths sworn by her ministers and senior civil servants, how do you or they explain or attempt to justify the present inherent and fundamental contradictions involved? 
	“5. At one stage in the EU’s metamorphosis, the issuing of an EU passport was merely a ‘recommendation’ by the EU. In which case, was citizenship merely a recommendation, too? And is it still?
	“6. What happens to the legal status of supposed citizenship if and when the EU purports to seize ‘legal personality’ for itself in the forthcoming Nice Treaty, after which it can then claim to be a country?
	“7. Are you aware that attempting to force EU citizenship on me may well breach articles 15 (2) and 20 (2) of the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights? 
	“8. Recently, we have been faced with two new and highly questionable charters of Human Rights, both of which seek to prohibit discrimination. I am told my ‘rights and freedoms [are] secured without discrimination on any grounds such as…association with a national minority…birth or other status’. Since our government has foolishly subscribed to these terms it must abide by them. By attempting to impose an unwanted foreign citizenship on me you are directly breaching my human rights, as defined above. I have a right and freedom to be a subject of the crown, and to be described as English within the UK. By being described as an EU citizen as well I am being discriminated against as a member of the English minority in the EU. On these grounds alone, logic suggests you should now withdraw mine and all other unwanted EU passports.
	“Which brings us back to the nub of the issue – my rights. These rights are beyond the reach of parliament or its servants. They are enshrined in common law, they were formally recognised in The Magna Carta (which the House of Lords Records Office has recently confirmed stands to this day – not that there was any doubt), these same rights were re-affirmed in The Declaration of Rights, entrenched in statute law in The Bill of Rights (which the Speaker of the House of Commons confirmed in 1993 stands to this day), and they were specifically renewed in the coronation oath sworn in 1953 by the present monarch.
	“Essentially, common law rights cannot be subverted by ministers and other servants of the crown. They have only the same powers and rights as the people who elected or appointed them. Their forebears were appointed specifically on condition that they would respect and defend the rights, freedoms and customs of the people. Nothing has changed the substance of that commitment since then. Furthermore, parliament has a duty of care to preserve and protect the rights and freedoms of the people who elected it. 
	“In the UK, the people are sovereign. The monarch is the embodiment of that sovereignty. Parliament is elected and answers to the people. Unlike Europeans, we British are free men. Here, the state answers to us – not we to the state, as in Europe. There are a great many things a parliament cannot do, and one of them is diminish or restrict common law. Statutes can ‘improve’ common law, but even if that statute is later repealed the original common law still stands. Thus it follows that the imposition of a foreign citizenship on a natural-born Englishman is beyond the powers of parliament since it purports to impose a system of law which makes an Englishmen subservient to the state – and that is an attempt to restrict sovereignty.
	“What’s more, present attempts to turn me into a citizen of the EU rely on legislation and treaties passed and signed from the 1950s onwards. So the EU’s present actions reduce to this: the imposition of a citizenship on people who do not want it, by an organisation which did not exist when they were born, to subjugate them to an alien system of government in which they have no confidence. Were they real, these would be near-magical properties…alternatively you may think them absurd. Retrospective law is widely held by parliamentarians and lawyers to be unsound and dangerous. In my case, having been born in 1936, am I now to believe that I was born into a country which did not exist and that the second world war was merely a civil war? It didn’t seem like it at the time, let me assure you. 
	“So here is my formal renunciation of ‘citizenship’ of the EU on the grounds that no such thing exists, I do not want it, and the EU is not a country. It has now and can never have any jurisdiction over my status as a subject of the crown, and as a free Englishman I have the absolute right to reject any such sham. I hereby do so.
	“Since you apparently will not issue the correct passport document to me I have amended the erroneous one you sent earlier this year. You may take the view that this is wilful damage to crown property. In which case I will make the evidence available to you and I invite you to issue proceedings which you can assume will be vigorously defended for as long as it takes and as far as it goes.” 
	There was no reply – nor has the “crime” of defacing Crown property ever been pursued.
	
Vvvvv

The EU’s Museum of Europe will open in 2003, next to the parliament in Brussels. It will omit all references to the cultural origins of Europe to be found in pre-Christian Britain, ancient Greece and Byzantium. Official EU “history” will start with Charlemagne’s first federalist attempts at unification in the eighth century. King Alfred’s pioneering that set in train the development of Anglo-Saxon England will be ignored.
	So will many of the other genuinely formative events and periods in the development of the continent of Europe. There will be nothing, for instance, about the German reaction, after the fifteenth-century Renaissance, when England opened its sea-trade route via the Cape of Good Hope to India. England’s subsequent mastery of international sea trade ruined the German economy. The Rhine and Baltic never recovered their previous dominance as trade routes between Europe and the East. 
	Ever since, Germany has sought to frustrate the UK’s global trade and tried several times over the centuries to tie us into a Europe that they dominate – and it’s still going on today. Over time, Germany has tried to control Europe by trade or war alternately. As Napoleon said: “Each country pursues the politics of its geography.”
	The EU museum is also unlikely to reveal the importance of the English group that came to be known as the Levellers. They emerged as political activists during the rule of Oliver Cromwell, when a great debate raged about the nature of liberty and freedom. They believed that the ancient rights of Englishmen lay in the notion of “self-ownership”. These self-evident “natural rights” permitted the individual, for example, to worship as he chose. Their leader, Richard Overton, in a pamphlet called An Arrow Against All Tyrants argued that everyone owned themselves, and had an absolute right to life, liberty and property. “No man hath power over my rights and liberties, and I over no man’s.”
	The Bill of Rights, of 1689 (exactly 100 years before the French got round to a more violent version of the same idea), is equally unlikely to feature in the EU museum. This was a seminal moment in English constitutional law, when the new King William and Queen Mary agreed to recognise and respect the “true, ancient and indubitable rights” of Englishmen.
	A year later, 1690, John Locke’s great work The Second Treatise of Government asked: what is the point of government? His answer was witheringly simple. People, he argued, have always had rights. They existed before governments. They are natural rights because they are to be found in the very nature of humanity. 
	They are rights we are born with, rights that we inherited from our earliest ancestors, rights that are ours to preserve and protect, rights that we own absolutely and squander at our peril. They will exist even when they have been abused or lost or cast aside. The next generation will always inherit them, though they might have to fight to re-establish them in all their glory. 
	Groups of people form governments to protect those rights. They could do so without creating a government, but the very idea of government offers – theoretically at least – an effective means of codifying and managing that protection. 
	But if that government oversteps the mark, if it takes powers beyond those granted by the people, if it attempts to restrict or deny the very rights it was elected to protect, then the people have the (natural) right to dismiss that government and to elect another. That is the essence of a democratically accountable system of government. It serves the people and preserves their rights.
	As John Locke said: “A government is not free to do as it pleases. The law of nature stands as an eternal rule to all men, legislators as well as others.” It is, he wrote, the role of government to protect the lives, liberties and estates of the people. 
	It was 100 years later that the great thinker Adam Smith held the same view. These great truths, the underlying principles of government, had not changed.
	Indeed, a series of newspaper articles at that time, which came to be known as “Cato’s Letters”, were again denouncing the government of the day for eroding the natural-born rights of Englishmen to enjoy the liberty to trade freely with each other. John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon argued for a return to a commercial environment that was unhindered by monopolies, guilds (trade unions in today’s parlance) and high taxes. The government should remove the constraints on commerce, they argued, and wealth would surely follow.
	David Hume took the argument further by pointing out that everyone benefited from the prosperity of others. The role of government was to protect those rights that enabled that prosperity to be achieved through trade. One of the most important was the law relating to contracts. If two parties entered into an agreement binding on them both, that contract demanded the force of law behind it. Furthermore, provided it did not impinge on the rights of others, the government should not interfere in it beyond providing the mechanism for upholding it in the event of a subsequent dispute.
	So, individual freedom, limited representative government and free markets became the three great cornerstones of the transformation achieved during the latter part of the last millennium, which we know today as the developed world.
	Thomas Paine, in Common Sense, pointed out that “society is produced by our wants and government by our wickedness”. Society, he suggested, is a blessing, and government – at best – a necessary evil. At worst, it was intolerable.
	Most succinctly of all, Thomas Jefferson, drafting the Declaration of Independence in 1776, wrote: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. That whenever any form of government becomes destructive of those ends, it is the right of the people to alter or abolish it.”
	In a nutshell, the people delegate powers to government, and take them back as and when they choose. People had rights before government existed, they retain those rights not expressly delegated to government, and the government of the day has no authority from the people to take more powers than it has been granted.

Vvvvv

In his 1982 election leaflet Tony Blair advocated leaving the EEC, as it then was. The leaflet said that it “takes away Britain’s freedom to follow the economic policies we need”. A year later, he committed himself in a speech: “We’ll negotiate withdrawal from the EEC.”
	Former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher said, after she no longer had the chance to make a difference: “Europe is always blind, cowardly, ungrateful and incorrigible – a continent without hope… .”
	Vaclav Havel, the Czech president, has said: “Politicians should seek office to do what they deem to be right, and not to keep hold of power for its own sake.”
	A German member of the Maastricht negotiating team said: “There is no alternative to European integration. Any other choice could encourage other countries on the continent to unite against us one day.”
	The Single European Act and Final Act, 1985, were steered through parliament by a subterfuge worthy of the EU itself. The words “Final Act” did not appear on the Bill. Its passage was via a two-line sub-clause in a minor Foreign Office Bill debated by a small number of MPs. The clause itself was never discussed.
	To get the Bill through the House of Lords, the government issued two order papers for the same debate. The order paper with the correct date went to peers known to be sympathetic. The other, with an incorrect date, went to all the rest. The Bill passed.
	Corruption in the EU is one is its most disgraceful features. It is utterly beyond control, and one of the most powerful arguments for its abolition.
	Of course the French have these black arts of political mendacity off to a tee. They have generations of experience. They bury their countrymen in bureaucracy.
	The Italians go much further, and don’t even bother with the niceties of apparently legal procedures. It is beyond doubt that former convicted criminals are supervising law and order in the EU. They are elected representatives of the infamous Forza Italia Party.
	Antonio Di Pietro is well known in Italy for his fight against corruption between politicians and businessmen. He is a former public prosecutor in Milan. Several members of the Forza Italia Party, owned by media boss Silvio Berlusconi, faced bribery and other charges thanks to Di Pietro. Today, Di Pietro is an MEP, as are several members of the Forza Italia Party with criminal records for corruption. They sit with Di Pietro on the European parliament’s interior committee, which is responsible for supervising law and order in the EU. Signore Di Pietro is known to be horrified, but can do nothing. 
	Indeed, under the EU’s curious logic, these villains can now claim to have some kind of parliamentary immunity. In utter contradiction to the law in the UK, the EU purports to set its bureaucrats, appointees and representatives above the law.
	In reality, of course, the committee has virtually no powers. Like all EU parliamentary committees, it exists to offer an illusion of accountability to the people who elected it. The seat of power is the EC, and the commissioner responsible for law and order in the EU is not even a member of the parliament. 
	It is, nevertheless, discussing – and doubtless has some influence on – anything and everything relating to law and order within the EU – including the proposed new and extensive powers for Europol (the European-wide police force), and international money laundering. Both these topics must be of enormous interest to the Mafia, which operates internationally, and which moves money about with great cunning. 
	Party leader “Cavalier” Berlusconi MEP is one of the interior committee members. In October 1999, a Milanese court of appeal declared the charges against the media tycoon for illegal party financing to have lapsed. But the court also confirmed massive corruption – to the tune of some 10,000,000 German marks – paid by his companies to a secret Swiss bank account for the benefit of the former Italian Socialist Party leader, Bettino Craxi.
	The former Sicilian governor, Marcello Dell’Utri MEP, co-founder of Forza Italia, is also on the interior committee. A lawyer and former manager of Berlusconi’s advertising company Publitalia, he was convicted in Italy of falsified accounting and sentenced to twenty-seven months’ imprisonment. Other charges relating to falsifying balance sheets and cooperation with the Mafia still lie on the files.
	According to Italian law, as a convicted criminal, Dell’Utri should not hold any publicly elected office. Yet he is a member of the Italian parliament as well.
	Meanwhile, a Spanish judge, Baltasa Garzon, wants the European parliament to lift the immunity on both Dell’Utri and Berlusconi following accusations that both are involved in embezzlement at the Spanish television company, Tele 5, in which Berlusconi has a major shareholding.
	Four other Forza Italia MEPs sit on the culture committee, which deals with the control of the media, among other things.
	Di Pietro told the German magazine Der Spiegel: “The system of lobbyists and ways to exert influence now operates on a European scale. That is the Berlusconi way.” Committee colleague, Martin Schulz, is even more direct in his condemnation: “The Mafia is making the laws here.”
	All of this is well known in Brussels. None of it attracts any serious attention. 
	
Vvvvv	

Now let’s have a brief look at the cost of UK membership of the EU. Here, too, the facts speak for themselves.
	The government’s 1999 “Pink Book” shows that the contribution by UK taxpayers in 1998 was £10.3 billion. Some £5 billion came back in the form of grants, with costs and strings attached, and are not what they seem. Also, they are based on the astonishing proposition that the EU knows better than we do how to spend our own money – but we shall consider that issue later.
	Looked at in another way, that £10.3 billion was an export tariff on the £96 billion of goods and services we exported to the EU. In that case, at 10.4 per cent, it was nearly three times the GATT world average of 3.6 per cent paid by the USA, Norway and Switzerland as non-members. Even discounting the grants we receive still leaves a tariff of over 5.5 per cent. 
	A cost/benefit analysis prepared by the Institute of Directors (IOD) in early 2000 calculated the actual cost of UK membership of the EU at some £15 billion a year, which is higher than the official figures because it took into account other costs the government chooses to ignore. However, it also took account of the net benefit of inward investment from EU countries, which the government also ignores in its own calculations.
	The IOD report claimed that these figures were on the low side, but they established with solid facts that the costs far outweigh the benefits of membership of the EU. The logical conclusion was that we would be much better off outside the EU, which is why many hundreds of IOD members were bewildered by the report’s Alice-in-Wonderland conclusion that the UK should stay in “for the [unspecified] trading benefits”! 
	Even more seriously, however, the report raised several important questions. Why did it take a quarter of a century to calculate a cost/benefit analysis of our involvement? Why was it necessary for a private organisation to complete the analysis, rather than the government? Why are we constantly told we must stay in because of the supposed benefits, while no politician or government department has ever produced a shred of verifiable evidence to demonstrate what specific benefits there are? Indeed, they have consistently refused to do so, despite countless requests.
	Perhaps the answer to at least some of these questions lies in the fact that when the Treasury started to run a cost/benefit analysis under the last Tory government, Kenneth Clarke, then chancellor of the exchequer, put a stop to it when it became obvious what the conclusions were.
	One of the problems for europhiles is the realities of our foreign trade, as Mr Clarke doubtless found. Total exports to the EU, including the Rotterdam/Antwerp effect (the value of goods shipped to Rotterdam or Antwerp for containerisation prior to onward shipping to other parts of the globe – estimated currently at over £2 billion a year) were some £25 billion in 1998. Exports to Asia (excluding Japan) were over £36 billion. None of that discouraged the British foreign secretary, Robin Cook, from claiming that the UK exported more to the Netherlands than to the whole of Southeast Asia. Why let the facts get in the way?
	The latest figures for UK trade relate to 1999, when we exported some 13.5 per cent of our total GDP. Of that, some 49 per cent of the goods and services we exported went to the EU. However, after removing the Rotterdam/Antwerp effect, the actual figure was barely 40 per cent, according to calculations by the co-chairman of the Bruges Group, Dr Martin Holmes.
	Over the last seven years, the total share of world trade enjoyed by the Continental members of the EU has dropped by 11 per cent. The UK’s has increased by nine per cent – mostly to other English-speaking countries, particularly in North America.
	In 1999 our ongoing trade gap with the EU continued unabated. The EU is the only area of the world where we have such a deficit. That year it reached almost £9 billion. Meanwhile, we imported less from the rest of the world, and stand in credit by over £100 billion over same period.
	Added to that, UK exports to English-speaking areas are growing twice as fast as they are to EU countries. And UK exports to the EU have been falling in real terms. The other EU countries now buy less from us than they did before we joined the single market!
	Even within the rest of the EU there is a trading problem. The idea that this is a single market, and that businesses and consumers all benefit, is nothing more than a monstrous fiction. Even trade between the core countries – Germany and France – has grown more slowly in recent years than the trade each does with the rest of the world.
	According to the IFO research institute in Munich, German exports were expected to improve by at least six per cent in the year 2000. The institute also expected the German economy as a whole to improve on the back of this boost to exports, yielding a much-needed reduction in unemployment. By late 2000 there was little sign of either, partly because the cost of crude oil had risen dramatically while the euro had fallen against the US dollar. 
	In recent years, the German economy has been in serious trouble. Unemployment was an unacceptable 4,000,000 people, imports were growing faster than exports, growth was stagnant, regulations were being piled on by the EU and the German government was itself in a political mess of sleaze and dissent. 
	But the weak euro has at least helped to improve all that, especially as the demand for German exports – cars and equipment in particular – has improved. 
	The euro has brought another benefit to the Germans, too. They are no longer faced with competitive devaluations by other eurozone countries. The French franc may have entered the euro at a particularly favourable rate of exchange, but at least that rate is now fixed. Neither the French nor the Italians can again undercut German prices by allowing their own currencies to fall against the Deutschmark. They must face the German export drive on what the euro-enthusiasts call a “level playing-field”.
	But with exchange rates no longer able to absorb the pressures, and interest rates equally fixed between those countries, there are only two other ways for the economic pressures between those countries to express themselves – inflation and unemployment. The German boom in exports is likely to generate even more pain in the rest of the eurozone because the other countries can no longer respond effectively.
	
Vvvvv

Monetary union was sold to the people of Continental Europe as a panacea. They were told it would reduce costs, reduce unemployment and create prosperity. The realities behind these wild and unfounded promises tell a different story.
	Claims that monetary union makes it easier for buyers to compare prices are nonsense. Price discounting is a function of trade, not of monetary policy, nor currencies. The assertion that exchange costs are reduced is also nonsense. Exchange rates are a zero-sum game, as we shall see in a moment. 
	If travellers and businesses don’t have to pay exchange costs they save less than 0.1% of GDP altogether – a sum which is barely measurable. And because UK businesses sell less than half their exports to EU countries, and we do not travel exclusively to them, we still have exchange costs and risks on the bulk of overseas sales and travelling. 
	It is not a problem to hedge currency risk. Many businesses generate a great deal of income by hedging and trading in currencies. If a currency is strong and getting stronger, the strategy is to buy now or forward. If it is weakening, wait. The people who complain about currency movements and risk simply don’t understand them.
	On the other side of each transaction is the bank that makes the deal. So when the trader wins, the bank loses, and vice versa. The net result is always zero.
	In fact, for the banking and business sectors, the costs and losses caused by the introduction of the euro in the eurozone itself have been considerable – far in excess of any piffling savings.
	Many companies and organisations have borne the huge cost of conversion already. One plc has admitted spending over £150 million. Taking the larger companies as a whole it has been calculated that they are spending on average over £30 million each on conversion despite the fact that under ten per cent of the profits of the UK’s top 100 companies come from the other EU countries. Many have no possibility of recovering that money from future euro-related business.
	But that is not the whole story. Most UK businesses do not trade with Europe. Yet they all face the cost of conversion – with no chance of gaining any of the supposed benefits.
	The total cost of converting sterling to euros has been estimated at £36 billion. This huge sum includes updating all computers, vending machines and cash tills, as well as staff-training and merchandising costs. 
	The government’s own expenditure on conversion is put at £3 billion. Originally, Tony Blair told the House of Commons that the cost to the public sector was a vague “tens of millions”, an error of several hundred per cent it later transpired.
	Meanwhile, an ICM survey of 1,000 company chief executives early in the year 2000 revealed that 80 per cent of them were not prepared to authorise any significant preparations for a changeover from sterling to euros until they knew the results of a referendum. Opposition to joining the euro among the business community had grown to a swingeing 69 per cent by autumn 2000, having risen steadily since the euro was launched.
	Looked at as a purely business decision we see a situation that should appal any responsible director. He or she is being asked to commit huge amounts of shareholders’ funds just to meet some possible legal requirement years down the road. Furthermore, most investors expect this project to fail.
	UK directors have a duty of care to their shareholders. Directors do not have the right to fritter away their companies’ assets on highly speculative and questionable expenditure, to which the shareholders have not given their assent. The simple truth is that they have been invited to join a high-risk, unproven scheme, which offers a negative return, and to do so on the basis that they can never opt out, never de-merge, and never sell the shares. An absurd proposition.
	If the chairman of a company squandered large sums of shareholders’ funds on such an ill-considered, wasteful, inefficient, loss-making venture, he or she would rightly be removed from office for incompetence, barred from holding office as a director in future, and probably prosecuted for fraud or corruption. 
	No one knows better than the owner what is the best use of their capital – certainly no government. Capital investment can be maximised only by owners of capital. Every time government intervenes in that process, either by diverting that capital or by removing it in taxation, the economy and the potential for growth is damaged.
	Neither parliament, shareholders, taxpayers, nor electors, have given their assent to the euro. It is increasingly unlikely they will ever do so. Meanwhile, in the unlikely event that customers or suppliers want to trade in the euro, or any other currency, British business people can do what they have always done – set their margins where they want them, buy or sell forward to cover the risk, and carry on as before. It really is that simple.
	On the BBC’s Today programme in February 2000, when asked how many British companies export to the EU, the chancellor of the exchequer plucked the figure of 750,000 out of thin air. This was not disputed by the interviewer. But Gordon Brown was exaggerating. His guess was fifteen times higher than the truth.
	Both the Institute of Export and the Bank of England estimate the total number of UK exporting companies at about three per cent of all companies in the UK. So, between 100,000 and 115,000 UK companies are involved in exports to some degree. The hard core is about 50,000 – and that is also about the number of exporters to the eurozone. 
	A damage-limitation exercise after the broadcast was mounted by the Treasury press office, who spun a web of further deceit by suggesting that Mr Brown had included all those companies which deal with companies which export to the eurozone – suppliers’ suppliers’ suppliers. They appeared not to notice the absurdity of such a notion.
	Next, we are told the euro will help reduce unemployment. But employment is influenced by costs and demand. So long as social security costs on employment remain excessive in Europe, so will unemployment. 
	Employment has nothing whatever to do with monetary union, beyond being a pressure valve when other components of an economy get out of kilter. And there is another problem – a significant inflexibility of labour in Europe. Any solution to pan-European unemployment requires a ready movement of labour from place to place.
	It happens in the USA – but it will not happen in Europe either now or in the foreseeable future. And if labour can’t or won’t move to the jobs and the jobs won’t move to them, the problem remains insoluble. All of that has nothing to do with monetary union. 
	When the UK foolishly joined the ERM (a prelude to the euro) in the late 1980s, unemployment rose to 3,000,000, and the national debt spiralled upwards with it. The UK suffered five years of recession or no growth. Simultaneously, but for different reasons, on the Continent a recession was worse and lasted longer. Unemployment rose to over 20,000,000. Since the UK was ejected from the ERM Britain has created more jobs – nearly 3,000,000 – than the rest of EU put together. In the same period Germany has lost 2,000,000.
	Today, unemployment is under four per cent in the UK, but averages over 11 per cent across euroland, when UK figures are included, and 13 per cent when they are not.
	The USA has a population of about 270,000,000. In recent times it has been creating on average at least 2,000,000 new jobs a year. The EU has a total population of about 360,000,000. In 1998 it created 1.8 million new jobs, but even that total was exceptionally high by recent standards. So the figures speak for themselves – the EU has a population 25 per cent bigger than the USA, but generates fewer jobs.
	In the USA, almost three-quarters of the population has a job. In the UK 71 per cent, in Germany 64 per cent, in France 59 per cent and in Belgium a mere 28 per cent work for a living. Those last three countries all have taxation levels and social security costs which positively discourage people from working.
	Much of the new employment that has been generated in the EU, especially in France, has been in the public sector, which in turn has added to the tax burden. Civil servants in Germany and France make up nearly ten per cent of the workforce – double the UK figure. While the Banque de France and the Bank of England perform roughly the same function for countries with roughly the same populations, in Paris the Banque employs 16,000 people. In London, the Bank employs 6,000. 
	The Union of Industrial and Employers’ Confederation in Europe (UNICE), in a 1998 report on European job prospects, co-signed by the Confederation of British Industry, said: “The EU’s employment record is dismal. Since 1970 the US economy has created just under 50 million new jobs, whilst the EU has created just over five million. For every ten jobs created in the US, only one is created in Europe. Unemployment stands at 17 million in the EU – 10% of the workforce.”
	Dr Gerald Lyons, chief economist of DKB International, speaking in London on 17 November 1998, coined a new definition for EMU. He said: “This poor jobs performance in Europe has not been a short term development. It has been a sustained problem. This problem is not about to be reversed… . European monetary union will make Europe’s jobs problem worse. EMU stands for Even More Unemployment.” 
	There are nearly 4,000,000 companies in the UK, but only a third of them employ more than one person. Only 0.1 per cent of British businesses employ more than 500 people each. The other 99.9% do not, yet they are responsible for well over half of all employment in the UK. Also, barely three per cent of them have any trade with the rest of the EU, either as exporters or importers. 
	So the scare-mongering claim that 3,000,000 UK jobs depend on EU membership is entirely false. A few thousand jobs would be directly affected if we left the EU but only in the short term. An explosion of new activity and confidence would quickly replace them, and create many more. Only 87 MEPs, two commissioners and a few civil servants would be permanently out of jobs.
	Finally, to the promise of more prosperity.
	Freedom of choice is the dynamic of a healthy economy. It is the very anarchy – unpredictability – of freedom of choice that is the greatest strength of any economy.
	Destroy that – by misguided so-called economic planning, by oppressive fiscal or irresponsible monetary policies – and you destroy the engine of wealth-creation. Economic planning is the fast route to the sick bed. The end-game is to plan the economy to destruction. It’s been proved many times over from Lenin to Harold Wilson. And it’s still going on in Europe today.
	What was peddled as a “free market” is nothing of the sort. If anything, it has proved to be the exact opposite. That is why we should have none of it.
	
	Vvvvv

The Labour government is very keen to let “consenting adults” do what they like to each other – except when one person wants to sell a pound of apples or a pound of beef to another. Since 1 January 2000 that has been illegal, punishable by a £5,000 fine, or six months in jail – the same as a criminal receives for assaulting a police officer. At least, it would have been illegal if the government had got its act together.
	The only problem is, this law is itself invalid. It was introduced under EU regulations without repealing an existing Act of Parliament that says that imperial weights and measures are legal. In this case, for technical reasons, the Act of Parliament prevails.
	All the government has done is create chaos, generate millions of pounds-worth of unnecessary cost for traders and retailers, who have replaced old scales unnecessarily, and left trading standards officers and local authorities in disarray and confusion as they try to enforce two contradictory laws.
	Ever since Edward Heath, the government of the day has been saying that metrication would be voluntary. It offers no commercial advantages, generates unnecessary costs, offends common sense, angers the vast majority of ordinary people, and achieves no discernible benefits. Compulsory metrication breaks pledges given by four successive prime ministers, including Margaret Thatcher.
	So it was not surprising that the compulsory introduction of metrication was announced on the quietest day of the parliamentary calendar, just as MPs were leaving for the summer recess and a mere five months before it was supposed to come into force. The news was broken in a parliamentary written answer. Because the government knew the measure would be deeply unpopular throughout the country, and adversely affect over 60,000 retailers and market traders, they slid it into the public domain as surreptitiously as possible. Not even a press announcement was made. Nor did they offer any financial help with compliance. New scales were required, and the traders must bear the cost. 
	Worse was the attempt to ban imperial measurements except as a form of supplementary information. In the UK, everything is permitted unless it is specifically prohibited. On this occasion, in an attempt to obey their masters in Brussels, the government claimed that the EU had somehow “allowed” imperial to be used alongside metric measurements, so long as they weren’t displayed in a larger format. This, in itself, is unconstitutional. While the EU might claim the power to tell the British government what it must do, it has no power to limit the rights and customs of the British people. Neither does it have the right to make criminals of those who prefer to use the systems of measurement we have used for centuries, and that – despite claims to the contrary – often have more common sense and advantages than the metric alternatives.
	Indeed, the British Weights and Measures Association (BWMA) claims that the old measures originated in prehistory and are far more consumer-friendly than the metric system, most of which was invented by scientists and bureaucrats in the aftermath of the French Revolution. It was then dragged across Europe by the armies of Napoleon. It met widespread popular resistance, which everywhere was quelled by force. To this day, in France, masons and carpenters calculate in pieds (feet) and pouces (inches), in livres (pounds) and onces (ounces) – beyond the reach of the metric police and their informers. 
	Britain’s traditional weights and measures may not lend themselves so obviously to decimal points, but they are far easier to divide into fractions. They are also based on “human” measures, such as the length of the foot, the distance from nose to fingertip, the amount of water in two cupped hands, and the area over which a horse can pull a plough in a day. 
	And there’s another point about the proposed switch from imperial to metric. By breaking the age-old link between cost and quantity, consumers do not know when they are being asked to pay more for less. The trend towards metrication in the supermarkets and elsewhere has been used to improve profit margins, just as was the switch to decimal currency in 1971. The pound imperial is exactly 453.59 grams. But cartons are not 453.59 grams. They have usually been rounded down to 450 grams. The old 20-ounce packet of crisps is not 56.7 grams – it has been rounded down to 55 grams. 
	Price confusion has proliferated, too. With units like a pint and a half-pint, a pound and half-pound, size options are limited. People know what they are buying. But not with grams. It might be the case that 100, 200, 250, 300, 325, 400, 410, 500, and so on, are all reasonable-looking numbers, while packaging and the quantities inside can be any size and appear sensible. But the customer cannot easily compare prices and value-for-money without a degree in mental arithmetic. One packet says 410 grams and costs £1.57. The alternative is 520 grams and costs £1.99. Which do you buy? Price increases have been possible by stealth as a result of this switch to metrication. On the whole, they have not dropped. Not surprisingly, in many cases prices have increased.
	Added to that, the practicalities of marking up greengrocery, for example, with duplicate labels that change daily, makes the proposition utterly unrealistic. Only a pen-pushing bureaucrat could invent such an idea. The number of tickets doubles, the customer is confused, and the produce itself is more likely to get damaged. The real purpose of this “concession” was to be make the EU appear reasonable, knowing perfectly well that few traders would be willing to use it.
	Of course the whole proposition is nonsense. We still buy a “bunch” of grapes or bananas, we drive distances measured in miles, use three-and-a-half-inch floppy disks, buy a quarter-pounder at the fast-food take-away, drink pints of beer, sleep in a king-size bed, print on A4 paper, pitch the stumps a chain (twenty-two yards) apart, use graph paper squared off in tenths of an inch, measure our height in feet and inches and our weight in pounds and ounces. Even the arrival of Master Leo Blair was announced in pounds and ounces. Like most children still, one day he will ask for a “quarter” of sweets.
	The building industry went metric several years ago. Today, we attempt to use metric-sized bricks and doors to repair and maintain buildings made with imperial-sized material. But we still buy screws at the ironmongers specified in imperial units – as indeed do Continental Europeans. British Standard fine threads come in sizes from a quarter, five-sixteenths, and three-eighths of an inch upwards, in larger sizes with Whitworth units and smaller sizes with nought, one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven British Association threads. There are no metric equivalents.
	Now look at the continent of Europe itself. What do we find? In France, customers can legally buy a pound [livre] of apples. Across the continent, plumbing is measured in inches, or “thumbs”. “Trois-quartres” (three-quarters of an inch) and “demi-gaz” (half an inch) are commonplace terms. The Dutch buy timber by the “thum”. Everyone in Europe asks for three-and-a-half-inch floppy disks. Imperial units are commonplace, and nobody gives a tuppenny damn!
	The introduction of metrication cannot possibly be about harmonisation and standardisation, at least certainly not in the UK. Our biggest single foreign market is non-metric. Most of our other major global trading partners are non-metric. The wealthiest retail chain operating in Britain is non-metric. The majority of our domestic trade, by far the largest part of our Gross National Product (GNP), is non-metric. Precious metals and precious stones are sold on the world market in non-metric units. 
	Computer parts are non-metric. The computer industry is dominated by the USA and Japan, where all measurements are imperial. Throughout the world all integrated circuits are made with pin spacings in fractions of an inch – typically a tenth, a fiftieth. That is never going to change so long as the industry is dominated by American and Japanese companies.
	The modern Bible refers to gallons (St John, 2), while the King James version used “firkins”. Our racehorses still gallop furlongs (ten chains). Sailors use knots, fathoms and cables. We may be obliged to buy petrol in litres, but we all know when prices reach £4 a gallon. Gas and water are still calculated in imperial units, and many industries still use and will continue to use imperial measurements with impunity. 
	If the law wanted to prove that it is an ass, there can be no better means of doing so. The admission by the DTI that “a common date for conversion…ensures that traders do not gain an unfair competitive advantage by delaying their changeover” is an open admission that traders who continue to use imperial will increase their business because they will be giving the public what they want. 
	The DTI also admitted earlier that “at present manufacturers in other member states have difficulty in competing with UK manufacturers in imperial units. For this reason alone it is unlikely that other member states would support an extension beyond 31 December 1999”. So British firms won more business when they supplied goods in imperial units. From that we are invited to deduce that this advantage over their Continental competition must be stopped. Where is the sanity in that? And what happened to the idea of competition and freedom of choice?
	As the BWMA pointed out after the introduction of metrication, it was ironic that the smart leaflets issued by the DTI as metric guides for retailers and shoppers offered copies in Welsh, of course, and also in Arabic, Bengali, Chinese, Greek, Gujarati, Hindi, Punjabi, Turkish, Urdu and Vietnamese. This was in deference to the cultures of the many immigrant minorities now living in Britain, while the purpose of the leaflet was to help destroy a vital part of our own native culture.
	No public support for the switch to metrication was ever sought by any government, yet they still went ahead. All the opinion polls confirmed solid opposition. The lowest recorded level of support for imperial measurements was still over 70 per cent, and that was some time ago. By the end of 2000, support for imperial units was even higher. 
	In the Independent Television (ITV) Teletext poll of Friday 4 February 2000, of 7,229 replies to the question “Do you support the new European law enforcing metric weights?”, 97 per cent voted NO.
	Happily there was also support from another, unexpected quarter. The law itself said that the compulsory switch to metrication was invalid. As the constitutional barrister Michael Shrimpton pointed out, in an opinion which is now known and understood by street traders throughout the country, the Weights and Measures Act, 1985, is still in force. This Act clearly and expressly provided for both imperial and metric measurements to be used in the UK. 
	More importantly, the regulations to enforce metrication were not themselves an Act of Parliament. They are what is known as secondary legislation, meaning that they were introduced under powers granted to ministers by an Act of Parliament – but the Act used was the European Communities Act, 1972. Since no parliament can bind its successor, an Act passed in 1972 – and regulations issued under it – cannot repeal an Act passed some 13 years later! 
	Also, secondary legislation cannot repeal primary legislation, either implicitly or explicitly. A regulation cannot contradict an Act. It is legally impossible to defeat the express purpose of an Act of Parliament by introducing mere regulations that purport to repeal it. Michael Shrimpton was categoric. If the government wanted to compel the use of metric units, they needed an Act of Parliament (not a regulation) that expressly provided for such a change.
	The only way retailers and street traders could be forced to sell in metric units would be by passing another Act of Parliament, banning the sale of loose goods in imperial units. Meanwhile, it was argued, the Weights and Measures Act, 1985, actually repealed the compulsory metrication part of the European Communities Act, 1972.
	After this confused state of affairs became apparent, and was explained with great clarity by Mr Shrimpton within a few weeks of supposed compulsory metrication, trading standards officers were in disarray. Any threats of prosecution, hefty fines, and confiscation of equipment, became little more than harassment, which is itself illegal under the Protection from Harassment Act, 1997.
	It is also an offence under the Trade Union and Labour Relations Act, 1992, to compel someone to do something they are not obliged to do by law.
	And to cap it all, the imposition of metric weights and measures flouts British rights under common law expressed with great clarity in Magna Carta and – if that were not enough – almost certainly contravenes the 1950 Convention on Human Rights, which safeguards freedom of expression. The British government might yet be embarrassed by a ruling on the matter by the European Court of Human Rights in the Hague. These illegal regulations seek to constrain a trader’s right to express his heritage and traditions by selling to his customers in customary weights or measures.
	The eastern region of the UKIP took up the cause of the retailers with great vigour. In a letter drafted for harassed traders to use in response to threats from trading standards officers, they pointed out:

1. Public opinion is strongly against this Regulation. According to a survey commissioned by the British Weights and Measures Association in January 2000, over 80 per cent of people still think in imperial weights and measures and wish to buy and sell in them. 

2. Metric units confuse the vast majority of customers.

3. Nearly all customers want to carry on using British weights and measures.

4. The alleged “crime” of selling in imperial units has no victim, except the EU itself. Since when did courts fine or punish people when no “harm” has been caused to someone else or to the public?

5. Such action would amount to a British magistrate fining traders simply for being British and expressing their Britishness.

	Essex butcher Dave Stephens took up the cause with equal vigour. He risked a heavy fine or being jailed rather than change over to pricing his chops, sausages and mince in metric units. When a council official handed him a weights and measures order he tore it to pieces in public.
	“I am a true Englishman and I don’t see why we should have to put up with this euro nonsense. I have started a petition and so far everyone who has come into my shop has signed it. We have more than 3,000 signatures.
	“We have lost so much to Europe, but I am determined to keep on with our traditional pounds and ounces. I feel so strongly about this that I am prepared to go to jail,” he told the press.
	On Tuesday 11 January 2000, UKIP leader Jeffrey Titford MEP, several hundreds of other customers, and a gaggle of cameramen and reporters, assembled outside Dave Stephens’ shop in Leigh-on-Sea, where they aided and abetted a substantial number of purportedly criminal acts. They purchased meat and meat products from Dave Stephens’ Mandy’s Chop Shop, all weighed and sold in pounds and ounces.
	A public challenge was issued to the Southend-on-Sea Borough Council’s trading standards department to observe these crimes being committed and to confiscate Mr Stephens’ equipment.
	Colin Gabell, head of trading standards at Southend Council, initially told the local newspaper that Dave Stephens was blatantly breaking the law. He was “doing things for publicity. But the time for publicity is over. My job is to enforce the law. Mr Stephens has got an unfair advantage over his competitors. Most are complying or are about to comply and Mr Stephens is obviously not going to comply”.
	Mr Gabell’s remarks clearly imply that metrication was intended to stifle competition. Yet when the UK joined the Common Market it was supposed to be to open up markets and stimulate competition – the exact reverse of Mr Gabell’s opinion. He also appeared to ignore the obvious fact that Dave Stephens’ “unfair advantage” was merely offering customers what they wanted – the very essence of competitive trade.
	Mr Gabell’s comments also represented a stark admission that people preferred imperial measurements – otherwise there was no advantage in using them. He also ignored the fact that Mr Stephens would not have an “unfair advantage” – as he liked to call it – if traders were free to choose the measures they used. It had been generated solely by the regulators interfering in things that should not concern them.
	Chairman of the BWMA, Bruce Robertson, set up a “Pound of Flesh” stall outside his Trago Mills food store in Newton Abbot, Devon, to sell apples, potatoes and English sprouts. Dressed in a prison uniform, he handed out receipts with names of the local trading standards officers and encouraged customers to report him, while a scoreboard kept a running total of his metric offences. By mid-afternoon, he’d broken the law 200 times. 
	Earlier, Mr Robertson had written to trading standards officers. He talked of the “unlawful imposition of these iniquitous regulations”, and categorically stated that Trago Mills stores would continue to use imperial units of measurement after 1 January 2000, and for as long as the overwhelming majority of shoppers wished. “Metrication is neither necessary nor welcome. It is an abomination to our culture. We should be free to choose whether to use it or not at will,” he wrote. In both these high-profile cases, the trading standards officers took no action. 
	But towards the end of 2000 there were clear signs that a test case in the courts was imminent. But not against one of the big guns in the retailing business, with money and clout. Trading standards departments showed no signs of prosecuting Tesco, which reverted to selling in imperial measurements when research showed that customers preferred them, nor McDonald’s for selling quarter-pounders. Fast-food chains like Wimpy, Burger King, McDonald’s and many others all sell quarter-pounders, and many restaurants sell steaks denominated in ounces – eight-ounce, twelve-ounce, even sixteen-ounce steaks. 
	Distinctive product- or brand-names like quarter-pounder might raise even more tricky issues for weights and measures inspectors. Best to avoid them. A market trader was a much easier target. Make a criminal out of him.
	But the threat of prosecution did not stop a butcher in Basildon, Essex, who erected prominent signs saying “No French beef sold here” and “Nothing French sold here”. The police told him to take them down, after a French woman complained – another sign of the EU’s corrosive attempts to control freedom of speech seeping into British life, undermining our rights and liberties, and giving official support to the lunacies of political correctness. 
	After the French refusal to open its markets to British beef, many thousands of traders and many millions of customers stopped buying and selling French products in quiet protest. That butcher merely gave expression to a reality. In any case, whatever the merits of his announcement, he had an absolute and unqualified right to make it, subject only to any local regulations about the size of display material.
	And the very idea that an Englishman might be breaking the law by selling another a pound of apples was – is – anathema to most people. But to have it decided and enforced by unknown foreign bureaucrats was – is – widely regarded as intolerable. 
	Enforced metrication has brought the law into contempt – something the EU excels at – but it has also invited civil disobedience on a massive scale. In that, at least, it has succeeded. Without law there is chaos. But the law must be seen to be fair and reasonable. Ultimately, and at a practical level through the jury system, it is the people who decide what is law. If it is not fair and reasonable the law will be ignored, as in this case. Eventually, of course, they can decide to change the law by electing a parliament with a majority willing to repeal or alter the original legislation.
	But enforced metrication has achieved even more than contempt for the law. It has undermined the relationship between the trading standards officer and the retailing community. On the whole, weights and measures inspectors do a good and necessary job in guarding against short measures, lack of hygiene, misrepresentation and so on. They are acknowledged for the work they do, and respected. 
	Of course in the case of metrication all this could have been avoided. There was nothing to stop the trading standards officers from advising the government of its concerns, and there was nothing to stop the government from taking notice. Instead, both caved in to EU pressure to introduce compulsory metrication, even when they knew it was entirely contrary to consumer interests, offered no practical benefits, caused confusion and expense for millions of people and was strongly opposed by the vast majority.
	Not one trading standards officer, nor any local authority tasked with enforcement, had the guts to speak up against this wholly unwelcome and unnecessary legislation. Instead, they simply accepted the changes, cooperated with Brussels and set about trying to browbeat British traders and consumers into submission by threatening them with large fines, confiscation of equipment and even closure of their businesses. 
	Meanwhile, the government did not advise the local authorities or the trading standards officers themselves that the introduction of metrication was based on flawed legislation and would never stand up in court. They were left to find out the hard way when legal opinion was sought by the UKIP and published on the internet. 
	It is inconceivable that the government did not know that the legislation was faulty, and that it would fail at the first attempt to enforce it through the courts. Quite apart from the disgraceful contempt for the law itself that such an attitude displays, especially from our elected government, it was an equally dreadful piece of mismanagement. 
	The DTI estimated the overall cost to business of conversion at around £33 million, with most being spent on replacing or adjusting some 200,000 weighing machines. A machine costs between £60 and £150 to convert, and the price of new scales starts at about £450. 
	So the net effect was this: businesses were bullied, almost certainly illegally, into spending vast sums of money to purchase metric scales that they didn’t want, to sell goods to customers in quantities they didn’t like, to satisfy foreign bureaucrats they didn’t elect. That is what the EU actually achieved.
	As the dispute over the legality of metrication developed, it produced some curious side-effects. For example, the UKIP leader, Jeffrey Titford MEP, received a letter from a manufacturer of weighing machines. The business manager of Deben Systems Ltd wrote: “We are suppliers of weighing equipment and services to retailers throughout the country. We employ over 300 people. We are now finding that the failure to effectively implement (sic) and enforce legislation is having a significant impact on our business.”
	The manager pointed out that all major multiple retailers and about 60 per cent of independent retailers had converted to weighing in metric.
	He went on: “However we are now getting stubborn resistance from our remaining customers largely due to the adverse publicity and campaigns run by pressure groups. We are also getting complaints from some of those customers we have converted that our advice was wrong and we have put them to unnecessary expense!
	“Our trade association, the UK Weighing Federation [UKWF], has been in touch with the DTI to obtain clarification. Unfortunately, we can get no satisfactory reply; it appears that the major concern is about negative headlines and the creation of ‘metric martyrs’.”
	He complained that the situation was becoming farcical, and that his company’s reputation was being damaged. Furthermore, the company’s capital was tied up in unsold stocks of metric scales and conversion kits. 
	He concluded: “The purpose of this letter is to draw the situation to your attention and to ask for your help in lobbying the government. We need them to issue clear and unequivocal statements on what the legal position is and what action will be taken against retailers who do not comply with the law.”
	It had not, apparently, occurred to the business manager of Deben Systems that he could sell his unsold items of equipment to the Europeans, who appeared to like them. He could make more dual standard and imperial units and sell them to the British retailers who now knew that the enforcement of imperial measurements was illegal. He could also sue the DTI for misleading him in the first place. His problem was actually a lack of commercial enterprise. He was also seeking the wrong help in the wrong place.
	The UKWF’s monthly statistics on the “progress” of metrication finally admitted after the first few months of supposedly compulsory metrication that the change-over was far from complete.
	Of the 96,000 independent, non-supermarket, non-multiple retail outlets, 58,000 had converted to metric but 38,000 (just over 40 per cent) had not, and were still selling in imperial units.
	At about £1,000 a time for legal costs, this rebellious disregard for so-called EU law left local authorities facing a bill of some £38 million if they attempted to enforce this flawed law, and the prospect of failing to secure a conviction in every case. Little wonder they funked it.

Vvvvv

Of the top 30 wealthiest nations in the world, 20 have populations of under 10,000,000. Virtually all of them are peaceful and democratic, as well as prosperous. The majority are not in the EU.
	Norway and Switzerland are not in the EU and they are thriving. If there are benefits to membership, how is it that they cannot see them? Switzerland has the lowest unemployment in Europe and the highest wages. It also has the toughest immigration laws. Norway has kept control of its vital offshore oil and farming industries.
	The tiny island of Iceland is independent of the EU. It is far from bankrupt. It boasts a total population of 275,000 people. It is a sovereign nation. It has its own currency, its own tourism industry, it controls its own fishing grounds, it has its own lifestyle and traditions, and it depends on no other country for support. It is thriving. Importantly, Iceland’s fishing industry is doing well – which is more than can be said for the UK. 
	Having left, the UK would be free to continue as the offshore island into Europe for the rest of the world. There has been absolutely no slow-down in inward investment in the UK from all around the world since we decided not to join the euro. That is no accident. The rest of the economic world sees us for what we are – a good place to do business.
	The UK has low inflation, low unemployment, a stable currency, a thriving economy and public finances that are under control. 
	Among eurolanders, there is rising inflation (Ireland’s housing boom is rampant), devalued currencies (the German Deutschmark fell more than 15 per cent in the first year of the euro), endemic high unemployment and stagnating economies (just about everywhere), and public finances which are still out of control (Italy and Belgium). 
	In November 1999, the outgoing Lord Mayor of London, Lord Levene, said: “The City of London is thriving outside the euro. It has increased its share of business.” A few days later, and more than once over the following months, the Governor of the Bank of England, Sir Eddie George, said much the same thing.
	The City of London is bigger in terms of GDP than Switzerland, Sweden and Austria. It has grown faster and attracted even higher levels of inward investment since the euro was launched than it did before. The flexibility of being outside the eurozone suits it very well.
	 Our foreign exchange market is the biggest in the world, our bond market is one of the biggest, and our stock market is one of the big three – all of which are yet more reasons why the Europeans want us in euroland. The City of London handles a third of the world’s foreign exchange. Daily market volume averages well over $750 billion, which is more than the combined average total for the next three largest markets – New York, Tokyo and Singapore.
	London financial markets holdings are the largest of any single country in the world. Almost 40 per cent of the world’s over-the-counter derivatives market trade in London – double the USA figure. Over 60 per cent of the primary international bond market and nearly 80 per cent of the secondary market, a quarter of the world’s marine insurance market and nearly 40 per cent of the aviation insurance market are all in London.
	In 1999, the City of London totally dominated the issue of euro-denominated euro-bonds. More than two-thirds were issued from London, despite the UK not being in euroland. 
	The City – meaning finance, accounting, legal and consulting services – is now the UK’s biggest and fastest growing economic sector – and now accounts for over a fifth of our national GDP (21 per cent) – the same as all our manufacturing industries combined. One in five (118) of Europe’s biggest companies have their headquarters in London. All ten of the largest European law firms are in London.
	That is probably why the City of London also handles 20 per cent of all international lending deals. In 1998, UK companies were responsible for almost a quarter of all international mergers and acquisitions, more than any other single country.
	Furthermore, this vibrant sector, our cultural environment, and our comparatively low levels of personal direct taxation, have attracted many high-net-worth financiers, entrepreneurs and other wealthy individuals to the UK. How long will they stay if we put that environment at risk?
	These are serious assets, which we have to protect. No one else will protect them for us – least of all the EU. Despite the present UK government’s half-hearted attempts to “defend” the City of London from the potential damage of the EU’s proposed withholding tax, the plain fact is that the EU can enforce it by redefining it as a “fair competition” measure. It is then subject to introduction by QMV, and the British veto will once again have been sidestepped. At the Helsinki meeting in December 1999 the EC admitted as much. Every country that has introduced a withholding tax on capital has simultaneously generated a flight of that capital to a safer haven.
	And the EU has every reason to try to destroy these precious national assets – they want the jobs and opportunities that go with them. What possible benefit flows to France and Germany by our joining euroland other than the destruction of the great strengths of the City of London? Already the French and Italians are trying to destroy the London art market – for exactly the same reasons and motivation. They seek control over us, because they fear our strengths and envy our success.
	So while Germany continues to subsidise its state banks, impose nationalist criteria on its pension funds’ investment decisions, demands withholding taxes, and regulates every aspect of business life, the UK is still comparatively free to allow enterprise to flourish – and this is seen as unfair competition!
	EMU is intended to disable some of the UK’s most important financial operations and services to the direct (and hoped for) benefit of Frankfurt and Paris. EMU is intended to restrict the UK’s ability to control its monetary affairs, change the regulatory climate under which it operates and remove the source of decision-making to a central bank that can permanently out-vote the UK.
	We have abundant and inescapable evidence to show that the EU’s agenda for the UK is to seize control of our assets and submerge our interests. This book is full of it. Yet we still stare in disbelief at our Continental neighbours, somehow hoping – even at the last minute – to convince ourselves that we have got it wrong, that they are honourable people. Sadly, they are not. As one of their own former employees, Bernard Connolly, put it: “They are liars. They are cheats.”
	
Vvvvv
			
For the British, the EU has been a ghastly mistake. We ordinary people expected a successful and peaceful Europe to be a Europe of free people, and free nations, trading freely together, built on a sound system of accountable, divided and restrained government, dedicated above all else to the protection of liberty. As that great Anglo-Saxon president Abraham Lincoln put it: “…government of the people, by the people, for the people.” 
	We British are slow to rouse. Too often, perhaps, we leave things to the last minute. We did so in the 1930s, and by 1940 we stood on the verge of ruin. But we also found ourselves carrying the torch of freedom. For a short and dire time the destiny of the free world lay in our hands.
	We were alone. But we were also inspired. We did not flinch or waver then. We did not fail. Nor shall we now. Of those critical years, Winston Churchill later wrote:
	“…we have the confidence in our bones of a people unconquered for a thousand years. This nation has a free sovereign parliament, fairly chosen by universal suffrage, able to turn out the government any day but proud to uphold it even in the darkest days.
	“Parliament is supreme. That was one of the points in dispute with our enemy. And Parliament won.”
	Now it must win again. And it will, now that we, the British people, are finally roused. If we are fearless, defiant, resolute, unyielding, we can retain our liberty, our essential freedoms. We are the people. Society and its future is our responsibility. It is not the government’s to give away. We cannot avoid that responsibility, nor can we allow that power to be removed. 
	It is non-negotiable.
	Millions now know that we can and must leave the EU. Even the “inevitability” argument (of staying in the EU) has become threadbare. It is no longer credible.
	Right now, millions of British subjects cry out for true visionary political leadership – statesmanship. They seek a politician who has the wisdom, vision, courage and sheer guts to make the unequivocal case for leaving, and take the short-term political risks that go with such a statement. It is desperately to our shame as a nation that no such figure – no real statesman – can be seen on the stage of British politics today.
	It is much better to face the truth. We have had more than enough of lies and distortions. There is really no reason why we, the people, should sink to the tawdry spin of the politicians who got us into this mess in the first place.
	When the French lost patience with their ruling class they cut their heads off. In Germany and Italy they were hanged, sometimes upside-down. The Spanish garrotted or shot their leaders, and the Greeks put theirs in prison. We once cut off a king’s head, but only once. This time, being the law-abiding nation we are at heart, a civilised examination of the facts in a court of law, based on charges of treason and misuse of public office, might suffice.
	If the opinion polls are right, about 130,000,000 people in the EU (about 35 per cent) want it abolished. By the end of 2000, barely half the total population of the EU still supported it.
	In 1939, Britain went to war to defend the independence of Poland. Six years later, both countries found themselves on the winning side. But Poland had finally been freed from Germany only to find a Russian yoke around its neck. As it was becoming clear that the USSR had no intention of allowing the Poles their independence, Winston Churchill told parliament:
	“Are they to be masters in their own house? Are they to be free as we in Britain and the USA or France are free? Are their sovereignty and their independence to be untrammelled or are they to become a mere projection of the [Soviet] state, forced against their will by an armed minority to adopt a totalitarian system?”
	Little did Churchill imagine that those same questions could be asked of Britain itself within half a century.
	But the alternative is there, just waiting for us. 
	The UK has been behaving like a junkie towards the EU in recent years – dependent on it, and afraid to give it up. The EU has become an addiction. And the politicians have ruthlessly exploited this dependency. 
	They have been systematically adding to the doses, and injecting it increasingly against our will. They now endlessly repeat the suggestion – like some kind of crazed psychiatrist – that giving it up will be a terrible ordeal. They are trying to convince us that we are too weak to kick the habit of this dreadful toxin, and that breaking the habit is an experience to be feared. 
	We know what to do. Like any drugged child, we must escape the treatment before we can begin to feel better.
	The EU is like bindweed – or a triffid. It gets into everything. Chokes everything. Swamps everything. Destroys everything.
	It travels secretly along the ground, crawls up any strong support and squeezes it dry. Occasionally it throws out an attractive flower which smells and looks pleasing. But it’s a trap. It’s designed to stop you tearing up this weed. It’s a bauble.
	There is only one way to deal with a weed – pull it out, roots and all, and throw it away. Clear the ground. Weeds are fit only for the compost heap.
	We could be out of the EU in ten minutes. Two privy councillors and a representative of the Queen could recall our ambassador with a phone call. That act alone declares that all treaties between the UK and the EU are null and void. 
	Parliament can repeal the European Communities Act of 1972. That has the same effect – it tears up the treaties, and the myriad of directives and so-called laws that have been based on it. They have no constitutional validity anyway, as they represent the giving away of powers that parliament had no right to give away. Meanwhile, all parties affected by them can consider them as repealed, effective immediately.
	Just tear them up, and tell Brussels there will be no more cheques from us. We’re selling all our euros as quickly as the market will bear. Our fishing grounds are now off-limits to up to 200 miles in all directions, effective immediately. Milk quotas and the CAP have been abolished in the UK, effective immediately.
	We also tell Brussels that, effective immediately, we intend to set our people free, to work and organise themselves in an enterprise zone extending from one end of these islands to the other, bearing minimal taxation and regulatory interference from Her Majesty’s government. Inventiveness and entrepreneurial enthusiasm will be encouraged vigorously, and British companies will be free to compete with the best and win against the best in the world. 
	In future, we tell them, we will happily work with you, but we will no longer work for you. And we shall compete with you on our own terms, not on yours. Here’s the deal. Free trade between us, but if you impose duties on us we’ll impose the same on you. We will not act first. You might care to ponder on these decisions and the fundamentals that lie behind them. You might even wish to allow the same freedoms to your peoples, unless you still believe that your way is best.
	By the way, before we finish, please pension off Messrs Kinnock and Patten – at your expense, of course. And you can tell the other countries that we’ve left the prison gates open behind us.

	Vvvvv

End of Extracts

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