Flying Free

by Nigel Farage

  *

  After its defeat at the hands of the people, the Commission had declared that a period of reflection was needed. A ‘group of wise men’, soon to be known as the ‘Amato Group’ after its leader, former Italian Prime Minister Giuliano Amato, spent really quite a long time preparing an alternative text.

  Which was, ingeniously, precisely the same.

  There were the same number of new competencies, the same number of powers of veto withdrawn. The all-important difference lay, as Amato pointed out, in the title, which they changed from the ‘Treaty Establishing a Constitution for Europe’ into the far racier ‘Treaty of Lisbon’.

  ‘The good thing about calling it a treaty’, said Amato with relish, ‘is that we don’t need referendums.’

  OK. It wasn’t precisely the same. They got rid of the preamble, which had always been incomprehensible and superfluous drivel, and the official anthem and flag, though these have, needless to say, returned without constitutional authority.

  They performed a lot of tricks by referring to previous treaties and sort of incidentally giving their provisions force of law rather than bothering to spell them out here. All that the leaders of member-states had had to read when they signed the eventual treaty was a hotch-potch of amendments which required referring back to the previous documents referred to. The European Council forbade the consolidation of all these clauses, though this had been unanimously requested by MEPs, until the treaty was safely signed. There was therefore no parliamentary scrutiny.

  And that was it.

  What had been Part I of the Constitution, with nine parts, now became Titles I–IX. Then there is a Title X, and Part IV of the Constitution is here rendered as Title XI. The European Council forbade the consolidation of the countless amendments into one comprehensible document, though this had been unanimously requested by MEPs, so none of us could actually read it.

  This was cheating.

  Forgive me if I here become a trifle fanciful, but governments perform, I suppose, much the same role as parents. The children are too busy playing and learning to worry about exactly how there are meals on the table or money in the bank, so they entrust to their parents a deal of power and the freedom of the family’s assets. They trust to natural benevolence and mutual interest.

  Of course, the amount of power claimed by parents and granted by children varies widely with different cultures and ages. We no longer accept arranged marriages in the West – though, provided that there be benevolence and insight on the part of the parents and the bride and groom have power of veto, parents may be better judges than the young in the throes of oestrus. Where there is no such benevolence and the parents are greedy for themselves, they claim licence to prostitute their own child.

  That is what the Europhiliac politicians have done with their trusting daughter Europa. They made a secret deal with the old bull for her violation in exchange for gold and power.

  They did it first by straight subterfuge. They groomed us, booked us into a double room with him – well, he’s a nice, harmless old chap, he’s loaded and you’re sure to come out of it with a pretty present, dear, and two rooms are much more expensive…

  We got pawed and slobbered over and very badly screwed. And it was our parents, not we, who were driving around in a flash new car.

  We sulked. We wanted to play the field, to party, but still we believed that our parents must have our best interests at heart. They kept taking us off to stay with the old pervert and hiring us out to accompany him to social engagements. They gave him the care of our jewellery and other inherited property. At last, when they thought that we were too beaten down to resist further, they sent out the wedding invitations.

  We arrived at the altar. We did our best to be dutiful, but took one look at the drooling brute and ran for our lives.

  So they arranged a new wedding. They soothed us. They loved us, didn’t they? And, to prove it, they had found this dashing young fellow who would still allow us to associate with whomsoever we would.

  He had a different name. He wore a bright new coat. They did not allow us to see his face until we reached the altar-rails. And at the very moment that we saw that glazed eye, the telltale dribbling from the dewlaps, the church-doors slammed shut behind us.

  When Jeffrey Titford and I had first entered the EU Parliament, we resolved that we would behave – at least in the chamber – like English gentlemen, and comport and disport ourselves with courtesy and propriety.

  Up till now, I had kept that pledge and had abided by the rules, however I despised the principles of those imposing them. Now the power-hungry eurocrats had broken their own rules and, whilst deriving wealth and power from them, were cheating the people of their right to democratic rule.

  The gloves were off.

  As the Commissioners tutted and the ushers manhandled me over the next months, I wanted to shout at them, ‘Don’t you get it? That is how it works, you bloody fools! Deny people a voice and the power to work change and first they become irresponsible and idle because they are reduced to impotence, then they start to hit out and to scream. And they are right to do so!’

  Whilst the Amato group was deliberating as to the exact font which should be used in the new edition, the correct spelling of ‘Lisbon’ and other matters of similar importance, Roger Knapman’s term of office ended and I stepped with remarkably little argument and tentative enthusiasm into the leadership. My enthusiasm was for the battle ahead which promised – and proved – to be more passionate, public, time-consuming and exacting than any in which we had thus far engaged.

  The tentativeness? Well, I was still apprehensive about doing anything quite so grown-up, but we had a good team to assist in the admin, Roger had left a party with a large, well-organised and largely unified membership and I was confident that I could get on with the front-of-house stuff so necessary at present without too many kitchen fires.

  On 12 December 2007, the day before the treaty was to be signed in Lisbon, the rowdyism started. As Felipe Gonzáles, the Spanish Prime Minister, entered the hemicycle to the usual sycophantic applause, eighty of us from across the ideological spectrum arose with placards and banners bearing just one word: ‘REFERENDUM.’ We chanted just one word: ‘REFERENDUM.’

  Over and over again we shouted it whilst totalitarian MEPs tutted and sneered and officials sent ushers scurrying uncertainly about the chamber to contain us, to confiscate banners and to prevent cameras from recording the event. We were scattered about the chamber, which made it hard for them. REFERENDUM! REFERENDUM! REFERENDUM!

  Gonzales tried to speak, but again and again had to stop. Ushers gathered up banners only to hear another outcry elsewhere and to rush off again. It went on and on. REFERENDUM! REFERENDUM! REFERENDUM!

  Oh, it was fun. The BBC and ITV, to their shame, almost totally ignored it, just as they were almost totally to ignore our friend and fellow banner-waver Dan Hannan’s brilliant demolition of Gordon Brown in March 2009. You can, I am delighted to say, still see both events on a public service broadcast medium, YouTube.

  Yes. We had broken the rules of civilised debate. We had brought demonstration into a place where there should be debate, but the self-appointed rulers of Europe had broken the rules first. They had prevented debate, so all that remained to us and to the people whom we had pledged to serve was demonstration.

  Later that day, the servile ideologues had their say.

  What is it about these people that they all spout the same words at the same time? Is it like that Darwinian phenomenon whereby, I am assured, monkeys on Madagascar started washing their yams in the sea for added salt intake at the same moment as their distant cousins on the African mainland, though there can have been no contact? Or could it just possibly be that they had all received similar briefings from on high?

  The EU was being accused – and justly – of using totalitarian techniques to suppress democratic debate, so Martin Schulz, chairman of the Socialist Group, stood up and told the parliament
that our conduct had resembled that of the Nazis in the Reichstag. Then up popped our Liberal (?) Democrat (?) friend (?) Graham Watson, who repeated his trusty football hooligan line, then compared us to the Nazis in the Reichstag. He also demanded that the president expel us.

  It was left to Danny Cohn-Bendit – no stranger, God knows, to demonstrations – to supply the supposedly tolerant line. No, no, he said. Just because we were mad and ‘mentally weak’, there was no call to expel us physically. There were 500 other members who were sane. This parliament was surely big enough to cope with a few dissident madmen…

  We were disciplined for being undisciplined – or, rather, thirteen of us were disciplined, including an Austrian nationalist who had actually been in Frankfurt on the day.

  Although I had been very audibly and visibly there and the president had identified me as a ringleader, I was mysteriously spared. A few weeks later, I was forced to stand up, raise a fist and declare ‘I am Spartacus!’, at which many of my colleagues did likewise – to the total bemusement of the president.

  I flew to Lisbon that night, tried in vain to grab a couple of hours of sleep and was at the glorious sixteenth-century Hieronymites Monastery in Lisbon in time to witness the signing of a treaty which no signatory had actually read. Gordon Brown, of course, turned up five hours late for the ceremony, so it was left to David Miliband to sign on his behalf and that of the entire British people. Security appeared to be non-existent. I buttonholed Miliband as he set off up the steps. ‘Remember your promise,’ I said. ‘We have to have a referendum.’

  He smiled weakly.

  Those were the last words spoken to him before he scrawled his name on a document which bound Britain into a soviet without the consent of the people whom he claimed to represent.

  I sincerely hope that they – and his residual conscience – ruined his one big day.

  *

  From that point onward Dan Hannan and I resolved that we must use the tactics of the great Charles Stewart Parnell. Neither of us is exactly a procedure man, and I certainly never thought that the day would come when I would go everywhere with the EU Parliament’s rules of procedure under my arm. We resolved, however, that we would use every procedural rule, every point of order and every opportunity for filibustering to register our protest.

  But this was not Westminster nor any democratic chamber where the rules are more sacrosanct than the members or any principle. We might have known.

  The new president of the parliament, Hans-Gert Pöttering, simply wrote a request to the parliament for the right to silence any member whom the Speaker or president deemed to be obstructive to ‘the procedures of the House’. Again, rules were not intended to apply to the divinely appointed masters. They demanded arbitrary powers. The parliament surrendered yet another guarantee of liberty.

  Outraged, Dan now joined Roger Helmer in the outer darkness where all Conservatives so sinful as to fight for liberty must go. His microphone was hastily switched off by a vice-president, but he spoke on regardless.

  ‘An absolute majority’, he said, ‘is not the same as the rule of law. I accept that there is a minority in this house in favour of a referendum. That there is a minority in this house against the ratification of the Lisbon Treaty. But this house must nonetheless follow its own rule-books. And by popular acclamation to discard the rules under which we operate is indeed an act of arbitrary and despotic rule. It is only my regard for you, Mr Chairman, and my personal affection for you that prevents me from likening it to the Ermächtigungsgesetz of 1933, which was also voted through by a parliamentary majority.’

  This was a far more apposite reference to Nazi Germany (though Dan had specifically refrained from making it) than that which our critics had used. Hitler’s 1933 ‘Enabling Act’ allowed the cabinet to enact legislation, including laws deviating from or altering the constitution, without the consent of the Reichstag. The Reichstag approved it – in large measure because the opposition was already in gaol.

  This time, however, because the allusion referred to the establishment, not to a minority, the EU suffered a serious fit of the vapours. The Conservatives became apoplectic (the distinctly silly Christopher Beazley even stood over Dan and invited him to ‘come outside’. Joseph Daul, the head of the EPP group to which Pöttering himself also belonged, at once demanded Dan’s expulsion.

  French farmers’ leader Daul already disliked me. In fact, he had been threatening to sue me for a year or so. He had somehow never got round to it.

  Yes. Yet another one, I’m afraid, again right up at the top…

  Back in January 2007, when he was named the EPP’s new leader, I had thought it worth mentioning to the parliament that Daul had been under investigation since 2004 for ‘complicity and concealment of the abuse of public funds’ (€16 million or £10.6 million) by French farming unions. There was no suggestion that Daul had personally profited, but his alleged complicity was surely a matter both of public interest and of concern to those who were about to elevate him.

  Daniel Hannan was, unsurprisingly, expelled from the group on 19 February for presuming to tell the truth and for making – or rather for not making – a comparison which our opponents had lately made about us to obsequious applause and official approval.

  The following day, we were thoroughly childish. Our staff dressed up in chicken suits and we in the chamber wore T-shirts in matching yellow bearing a picture of a chicken and the legend ‘Too Chicken for a Referendum’.

  Well, we had to attract the attention of the media somehow.

  In my time, there have been many costumes seen in the parliament buildings. It is, after all, an acknowledged weapon in the protestor’s armoury. Climate-change activists, for example, have worn death-masks and black cloaks and have been treated with due deference. When our staff, however, dressed up and cavorted in the lobby a bit to draw attention to the cowardice of the Commission in declining to face public opinion, they were harried, pursued and threatened with disciplinary action and arrest.

  A memorable note was delivered to me in the chamber. It read, ‘Your chickens are being arrested. Please can you help?’

  I ran out into the lobby and attempted to reason with the officials who by now had the chickens cornered.

  I was interviewed by veteran ITN correspondent Jim Gibbons. I told him that the parliament was now resorting to totalitarian methods, that we had been accused of being mentally ill and of being Nazis and that all that we were in fact doing was seeking the consent of the European people for the actions of its soi-disant parliament. At this, the head of audio-visual services in the parliament stepped forward and told Jim, ‘I don’t want you using that clip. We’re not here to record dissent.’

  My jaw dropped. Jim blinked and stared. Here was blatant totalitarian censorship in action in the middle of western Europe.

  Fortunately a senior BBC correspondent showed a little more articulacy and presence of mind than I. Shirin Wheeler, the daughter of the great Sir Charles Wheeler, briskly told the Jacques-in-office, ‘Very well, if that’s your attitude, the BBC will withdraw from the European Parliament.’

  There was a bit of stammering then.

  The would-be Brussels Beria gulped and sadly bethought himself that he had not yet been granted that degree of arbitrary power.

  It had been an aberration, it was later explained, an excess of zeal…

  Unfortunately, that sort of thing is highly infectious.

  *

  One by one, the professional politicians in member-states acceded to the EU’s demands and ratified the Lisbon Treaty without reference to their citizens.

  Only four nations held out – Germany (who managed to extort an admission that Basic Law had precedence over the European Court of Justice), Poland (who saw no point in signing until the Irish had approved), the Czech Republic – or, rather, one man in the Czech Republic, President Václav Klaus (who declined to sign for a long as he could, and first obtained an opt-out for the Beneš decrees) – and Irel
and.

  The Irish have known much of oppression and cherish their freedom. In accordance with common sense and principles of fairness, they hold that no change can be made to the Constitution without the explicit approval of the people. They rejected the Nice Treaty in 2001 and accepted it in 2002 only after they had obtained an opt-out from any common European defence policy and established the primacy of the Dáil in any further integrationist measures.

  They must once more ratify the treaty by referendum or it must die.

  Since Nice, of course, the Celtic tiger had all but transformed Ireland. A combination of a superb educational system, native savvy, low interest-rates and massive grant aid from Brussels had seen a gold-rush. A stable, largely rural and frequently black economy had morphed into an international boom which was the envy of the rest of Europe.

  Admittedly, some of the smooth new highways being built to replace pot-holed byways actually led nowhere in particular, property prices soared, immigration was managed with staggering insensitivity with tiny rural villages suddenly having their populations all but doubled within weeks and the despised ‘Foxrock Fannies’ were suddenly the kings and queens of the castle that they had always believed themselves to be, but the folding stuff was there in plenty.

  It takes more than that, however, to make Ireland meek and compliant.

  The ‘Yes’ contingent denied that the treaty had constitutional significance. Just in case there should be any democratic dissent, Taoiseach Brian Cowen stated that any member of the Fianna Fáil parliamentary party campaign declaring against the treaty would be expelled, The media were all but unanimously yes-men.

  The executive council of the Irish Congress of Trade Unions, demonstrating that they had learned something from the EU, voted to support a Yes vote but omitted to consult members of the individual unions. In fact, the Technical, Engineering and Electrical Union (TEEU) advised its 45,000 members to vote ‘No’.

  Kathy Sinnott, an independent member of our group, led our ‘No’ campaign. Millionaire Declan Ganley, founder of the pan-European party Libertas, ran his own. Sinn Féin were opposed to the treaty, the Greens undecided. Otherwise, we had no support amongst the professional politicians.