Like a gold coin on a dunghill, the truth about the EU



Peter Lilley's message is clear - 80 per cent of Britain's laws are now made in Brussels and Parliament has no power to reject or amend them

Amid the silly soap opera that now passes for British politics, in which we are supposed to care more about hairstyles and mannerisms than about the country, there was one moment last week when a decent man said something important. The brief flash of truth shone out like a gold coin on a dunghill.

The man was Peter Lilley, older and wiser than when he used to sing daft songs to Tory conferences. Mr Lilley looks to me as if, like several others, he is trapped in the Unconservative Party and would blossom like an irrigated desert if only he could escape from it.

Because what he said was important, there have been far too few reports of it. Hansard for Tuesday, June 3, at 3.35pm, will give you the details, if you want them.

But his clear, hard message was that 80 per cent of our laws are now made in Brussels, and Parliament has no power to reject or amend them.

If you wonder why our Post Offices are all closing, it’s thanks to an EU directive. So is the increasingly hated Data Protection Act. So are Home Improvement Packs and fortnightly bin collections.

In 15 years’ time our Parliament will have only two functions left – to raise taxes and declare war – admittedly things that our current politicians are rather keen on.

Mr Lilley’s mischievous suggestion is that MPs’ pay should be cut each time they hand over authority to others. Incredibly, many MPs don’t know what is going on. If they ended up on the wages paid to district councillors – which is all they really are now – they might care more.

His own stark words cannot be improved upon: ‘Few voters, or even members of this house, fully realise how many powers have been, or are about to be, transferred elsewhere. There are three reasons for this. The first is that governments of all persuasions deny that any significant powers are being transferred.



The second is that, once powers have been transferred, Ministers engage in a charade of pretence that they still retain those powers. Even when introducing measures that they are obliged to bring in as a result of an EU directive they behave as though the initiative were their own.

‘Indeed, Ministers often end up nobly accepting responsibility for laws that they actually opposed when they were being negotiated in Brussels.’

So now you know. Not since Dunkirk, 68 years ago, has our national independence been so imperilled. But back then, we could see the danger. Now most of us pretend it isn’t there.





Why must we pay for £18m Ross to insult our values?

Jonathan Ross talks on TV in an arrogant sort of loudspeak

Defiantly refusing to get the point, the BBC continues to claim that it is right to pay £18million to the superslob Jonathan Ross.

There’s more to this than just bad taste. It is a cultural cringe, the worship of loutism and a deliberate grinding of the faces of the morally and culturally conservative people of this country.

This force is so strong that David Cameron (as is now largely forgotten) submitted without protest while Ross subjected him to lewd questioning, asking him if

he had masturbated over pictures of Margaret Thatcher.

Ross talks on TV in an arrogant sort of loutspeak.

I wonder if he talks like that when he’s dealing with his lawyers and his accountants.



His every attitude and gesture implies contempt for what he no doubt regards as ‘stuffy’ and ‘conventional’ attitudes – that is to say the invisible web of moral goodness that used to keep us safe, but which very rich people (like him) don’t need because they can shield themselves from real life.

Who decides that such a person should be given a major slot on primetime TV? What can those of us who dislike it do? Nothing. Your money – extracted from you under threat of imprisonment – will be handed to Mr Ross whatever you think.

I am the last conservative I know who supports the BBC licence fee, but – following this Marie Antoinette piece of arrogance in which we are told we must pay to be insulted – the Corporation has probably ensured that its days are numbered.

If it thinks Mr Ross is so marvellous, why not hold a flag day for him and see how much of the £18million it manages to raise?





Good enough for you, but not for Benn

The great infuriating unpunished scandal of socialist school hypocrisy never ceases. They take for themselves what they deny to others, just like the old

Kremlin Politburo. And they have no shame about it.

The late Caroline Benn, wife of Tony, was the most fervent campaigner for comprehensive schools in Britain.

Mr Benn – consistent with his principles – withdrew his two sons from their private school to send them to a comprehensive. One of those sons, Stephen, then tried to become a Labour councillor and worked for the fanatically egalitarian Inner London Education Authority.

He married Nita Clarke, another career Leftist (one-time Press officer for Glenys Kinnock, later a Blair adviser at Downing Street). Now we find that their 18-year-old daughter, Emily, has been attending... selective grammar schools. These are the schools her family opposed for decades. Labour still hates them so much that its last Education Act (backed by the Useless Tories) banned the creation of any more.

Apparently unbothered by this ridiculous contrast between her private advantage and her public views, Emily Benn is now trying to become a Labour MP.

‘I care more about the people that aren’t in grammar schools,’ she trills. I bet she does.





Reality that's beyond belief

Some time ago I tried to write a satire, imagining what Britain would be like after ten years of New Labour rule.

My imagination wasn’t up to it. I predicted cannabis on open sale, and licensed shops for stolen goods, which has more or less come true.

But I would never have dared suggest that parking wardens would be paid more than front-line soldiers, or that thousands of prisoners would turn down early release because it was too nice inside. Is the problem that we are now so outrageously misruled that we are unable to believe it, and so can’t bring ourselves to do anything?



• Once upon a time Government Ministers would never dream of commenting on criminal proceedings. But on the BBC’s Question Time on Thursday night the Foreign Secretary, David Miliband, referred to live cases during a lame attempt to justify the Government’s despicable plan to introduce 42-day detention without charge. He said, before an audience of millions: ‘Three cases have gone not for 14 days, but for 27 or 28 days, and those three cases are now being pursued through the courts for the most serious terrorist offences.’ The word ‘alleged’ is missing. Can this be right?