21 years of Maastricht: "My last speech in a free Parliament" - Tony Benn

House of Commons, Thursday, 20th May 1993, 6.35 pm:

Mr. Tony Benn (Chesterfield) : Tonight's vote on Third Reading will have a pre-set majority. But not one hon. Member has the legal or moral authority to hand over the powers that they borrowed from their electors last April to people who will not be accountable to those whom we now represent. Not one of us put the Maastricht treaty before the electorate last year, because it was not then published in English. We offered them no choice--the Labour party, without any conference authority, decided to support the treaty. I know that the Labour party had no authority, because the Maastricht treaty was negotiated after the conference, which intervened before the manifesto was written.

The problem for those who are passionate about Europe is that they cannot offer this country to Europe. Only half the seats in the Chamber are occupied for tonight's debate and the Opposition intend to abstain in the vote. If I were a passionate federalist--which I am not--I would feel more concerned about tonight's vote than anyone else. If others in Europe say that we have supported them, it is not true. The House of Commons, under the Whips, the patronage, the discipline and the disillusionment, has supported them, but not the British people.

A democracy consists not merely of a mechanism of becoming elected and passing a law. It contains the responsibility of gaining the continued consent of the electorate. At the next election I shall have to say to the people of Chesterfield, "Vote for me and I shall fight for you, but do not vote for me to deal with your agricultural, environmental, trade or even foreign policy, and certainly not your economic policy." We are handing over the British people, without their consent, to a system that has replaced parliamentary democracy, which we have been told is the justification for what we are doing tonight.

Would the House have been entitled to take Britain into the United States of America, join the Warsaw pact or invite in Soviet troops without a referendum? Of course not--nobody would believe that for a minute. We have experienced a coup d'etat by a parliamentary elite, not only in this country, but in the whole of Europe. They have abandoned their tasks as representatives and become the managers of Europe.

Mr. Dykes : Will the right hon. Gentleman give way?

Mr. Benn : I should love to give way to the hon. Gentleman, but I have an argument that I want to advance and I have only 10 minutes in which to do so.

The House has given up its power, because it has lost interest in its role. I do not think that the House of Commons wants power any more ; it has traded status for power. Hon. Members now get on the television and are introduced as the right hon. Member for Chesterfield or whatever, but they do not want power. For them, status is much more important.

The Labour party has adopted a completely new philosophy--that of being in government when not in government. We now have shadow Ministers--the French call them "phantomes", which is appropriate. I heard that my right hon. Friend the Member for Manchester, Gorton (Mr. Kaufman) went to Paris and Le Monde called him le secretaire d'etranger phantome de Britannique. I can imagine people placing entries in "Who's Who" such as "Phantom Prime Minister 1983-1992". We shall have a phantom queen next, who will call for Buckingham palace to be open for two or three months a year at £9.50 a tour. We have abandoned our representative role, and the same is happening in every country. It is that crisis that lends support to a Ross Perot and Le Pen. As Members of Parliament, we do not represent people ; we hope to manage them. If we cannot manage them, we pretend that, if we were to manage them, we would do it better than the Conservative party.

During the election, the Chancellor appeared on a Labour poster as Batman. I thought that it was a Tory poster, trying to make him more attractive to younger voters. What is the point of abuse when there are matters of substance to discuss, such as how to solve unemployment, what sort of Europe we should have and what new world order? We have abandoned all those issues. I must not be controversial--that is not my practice--but my party, in supporting the Maastricht treaty, has abandoned everything for which the party was established. Others may take a contrary view. The Labour party believed that people had the right through the ballot box to control those who made the laws and, by getting a majority, to change the economic system under which they lived. However, the party has now given it all up. I am not saying that it has done so out of wickedness ; it was out of a lack of self-confidence.

I do not think that members of Labour's Front Bench would have even two ideas about what to do with the economy if they came to power, other than with a central bank. I say this with some regret, but a series of sound bites glued together and called an economic policy is not an economic policy. That is the problem-- [Interruption.] I am sorry to speak sharply, but, if this is my last speech in a free Parliament, I had better say what I think and take the consequences. I bitterly resent the title "Euro-sceptic". Am I an "Anglo-sceptic" because I did not like the Thatcher Government? I oppose the Maastricht treaty as a European because it takes from every country in Europe the rights that are being taken away from us. It does not offer durability. The treaty has divided every country in Europe--Denmark went one way and then the other, France agreed by a narrow margin and Ireland by a bit more, but in Britain the people are not allowed to vote.

Let no one tell me that proportional representation to put people in an impotent Parliament within a European federation merits a referendum. That is an utterly disreputable argument, and no one will believe it. Labour does not want to have to put to the Labour movement and the public the arguments for the Maastricht treaty and European union, because it knows that those notions would not win support.

A moment ago, someone said that 83 per cent. of the people in Germany want a referendum and two thirds wish that the Danes had voted no. The treaty will fail ; that is the tragedy. I shall get no satisfaction from its failure, but it will fail because it cannot be made to work. When it fails, a Bosnian-type crisis will emerge, because one can no more impose capitalism from Brussels than communism from Moscow. It cannot be done--you must carry people with you.

That is why I suggested a commonwealth of Europe, a looser arrangement where harmonisation is by consent. I believe that the crisis in the former Yugoslavia would be much less serious if we had a commonwealth of Europe in which it could find a place without having in place of the iron curtain a gold curtain or a deutschmark curtain, which means that, if one cannot fit in with the policies, one is not acceptable.

I hope that the House will forgive me for speaking with passion. I have often wondered whether, when we lost democracy in Britain, it would be to the red army, the Militant Tendency or Oswald Mosley, but in fact we ourselves have given it up. The House has agreed to abandon its responsibility to hold to account those who make our laws. We have given it all up. Walter Bagehot said in the 19th century that the British constitution was divided between the dignified and the efficient. He said that the Queen was the dignified and that the Commons was the efficient. The Executive is now the efficient, and we are the dignified.

We no longer want power. We do not care whether it goes. The nation accepts that because, after centuries of subservience to a monarch whom we cannot elect or remove, we are trained to be subservient. If we learned to live with William the Conqueror, we can learn to live with Jacques Delors. People have been trained--there is a culture of bowing and scraping, going to another place with my Lord this or my Lord that. The nation has never been allowed to develop the equality that comes with birth, to govern oneself as one thinks right and then to collaborate, harmonise and co- operate with other nations. The idea of one country living alone is absurd. We could be killed by a Chernobyl nuclear disaster or destroyed by a nuclear weapon from China. There is no national sovereignty, but there is a right to choose and remove the people who make our laws. When we vote tonight, under the discipline of the Whips and the patronage system, which is also a corrupting influence, the House will abandon that which makes it a focus of interest and attention for generations of people, from the chartists and the suffragettes until now.

In 1970, we permitted the vote at 18. The meaning of the vote was taken away on 1 January 1973. There were two and a half years of the right of the electorate, but it was too dramatic a power and the Government, without a referendum, took it away. I regret the fact that my right hon. and hon. Friends now hope that they will get more justice from Jacques Delors than from the Government. It is not a policy which any progressive party could pursue.

http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm199293/cmhansrd/1993-05-20/Debate-5.html

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"Swivel-eyed": a riposte

A lazy insult against those who are not part of the unrepresentative consensus in Parliament is that they are "swivel-eyed."

In fact, swivelling one's eyes to remain focused on an object is one of the signs of not being brain-dead:

(Pic source)

Just so you know.

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More water mystery: H3O2

 

Layers of EZ (exclusion zone) water next to hydrophilic material
From Prof Gerald H Pollack's TED lecture
Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i-T7tCMUDXU

Water appears so simple, yet ...

A few days ago we looked at the Mpemba effect, whereby hot water freezes faster than cold. As yet there is no single, universally-agreed explanation.

Today AK Haart shows us a TED lecture by award-winning Professor Gerald H Pollack from the University of Washington, about the "fourth phase" of water (apart from solid, liquid and vapour). Truly fascinating, especially in its potential uses (e.g. desalination, purification, energy production):



And just this last Thursday there was a BBC4 programme about plants, which at one point showed that inside leaves, the light-utilising chloroplasts that make starch actually move about in response to sunlight, seemingly to utilise the energy most efficiently.

The clip (available only for a few days more) is here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p011kv6c.

Chloroplasts "jostling for position"
from "Botany: A Blooming History" (BBC4, 17 April 2014)

Could the electrically-charged layers of water described by Professor Pollack explain this movement?

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Is Scotland already free?

The EU has confirmed that Scotland would need to reapply for membership in the event that it was no longer part of the UK.

http://www.scotsman.com/news/politics/top-stories/scotland-will-be-made-to-reapply-for-eu-membership-after-independence-says-eu-chief-1-2680064

But this may have happened already.

A previously blogged legal point raised in Rodney Atkinson and Norris McWhirter's "Treason at Maastricht" said that Maastricht, by diminishing the political rights of Scots, broke the Union with Scotland Act and therefore severed the two countries in 1993.

It follows from this that Scotland is not now, and has not been for the past 21 years, in the European Union, and so has gained full sovereign independence at a stroke.

Perhaps one day we could see the formation of a new, non-EU Northern Alliance between Iceland, Norway and Scotland.

And in that case, what of the economic basis on which England seeks to threaten the Scots? Think of North Sea oil (and other mineral rights), fishing, whaling, an Iceland-style firm hand with banks and bankers (and so a safe offshore haven for panicking European investors keen to avoid bail-ins)...

Suddenly the dream is not just an ethereal castle in the air.

Oidhche mhath! God natt! Góða nótt!

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Kingdom

"My personal sense now is that there are no real political solutions to human wickedness. Ironically, as time has progressed, thinking long and hard about those churches, I have come to believe the only consolation is spiritual."

Aidan Hartley, "Before you talk about 'Lessons from Rwanda', read this" (Spectator magazine, 5 April 2014).

Reading this article the conclusion struck me as odd, because I'd never clocked Hartley as religious before. He certainly has his feet on the ground, describing dreadful massacres he'd witnessed; and his other Africa pieces about farming in Kenya show he is brave and resourceful, so he's no "All Gas And Gaiters" Holy Joe figure of fun.

Maybe it's a sign that the wheel is turning again..

I sometimes think artists are the canary in the mine. The rhythms and paganism  of Stravinsky's Rite of Spring always suggested to me a consciousness that something was coming; perhaps Fuseli's frightening supernatural paintings were a pre-tremor of the French Revolution and Terreur.

There's a sense of fin de siècle, at least for me. The Sixties people, some of whom have got to the top and run the show now, have had their turn, trying to get back into the Garden. I suppose it was a millennial craze like the others that erupted over the centuries, looking for a quick way to God, turning as before into sensuality and violence.

More recently, the artists have given us a physicalist curdling of hope. The morbid art of Damien Hirst and Gunther von Hagens seems to have been saying, "Look, mere mortal arrangements of matter, that's all we are"; just as in the madness of the Forties the grisly pseudo-scientific experiments of the Nazis in their death camps and the Japanese medical atrocities in Manchuria said, "We have searched thoroughly and there is no soul. Our cruelty and your suffering are a temporary salve for our despair. There is only fleeting glory and death."

I don't know what to believe, but I can't believe that. Are we due for a period of religious revivalism?


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Scottish independence: has Maastricht already severed the Union?

Reading Rodney Atkinson and Norris McWhirter's "Treason at Maastricht",  I come across a very topical possibility:

"Some statutes within the British system of an informal constitution could perhaps, at some stretch of the imagination, be regarded as less critical. But this could certainly not be said about the Union with Scotland Act, for in 1706  the Scottish people decided to share a Sovereign and a Parliament. Since the new Parliament of the UNITED Kingdom was to be in England (and the physical existence of the Scottish parliament dispensed with) the terms of the Act of Union were absolutely vital. The Act is the nearest we possess to an actual constitution. The Scots, effectively, gave up their Parliament only in return for the guarantee that the new (English dominated) Parliament would not curtail or in any way diminish their rights. If they did so (as has now happened under the Maastricht Treaty) then the Act of Union would be null and void and not only would the United Kingdom cease to exist but so would the authority of the Parliament at Westminster which was spawned by the Act of Union.

This is exactly what has happened..."

If the authors are correct (and they were legally careful in laying before the authorities their treason allegations against Douglas Hurd and Francis Maude), it would seem that because of this breach of contract Scotland has been free since 1993 and there is no need for a Scottish referendum.

 Will you tell Alex Salmond, or shall I?

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Lord Blake on the need for a referendum

My Lords, I wish to make one point and one point only: the debate is about the constitutional effects of ratifying the Maastricht Treaty. I strongly believe that whatever those effects may be they should not occur without the endorsement of a referendum. I happen to have the honour of being president of the Campaign for a British Referendum, or CBR in the acronymic world in which we now dwell. This is not an organisation which is either anti- or pro-Maastricht. No doubt some members have strong views one way or the other, but they are united by the view that whether one is for the treaty or against it the issue is of such constitutional importance that it ought to be submitted direct to the popular vote.

 

The referendum is not, as some claim, un-English and unprecedented. Mr. Harold Wilson, as he then was, promised in 1974 a referendum on the renegotiated terms of Britain remaining in the EC. That was duly held in 1975, very much on a cross-party basis. Referendums have been held on other matters, as noble Lords have said.

We shall no doubt be told that there is no need for a referendum because all three parties supported Maastricht at the general election in April last year. But that, of course, is precisely why we should have one. The issue was never properly discussed. In any case, elections turn on a host of other matters such as Mr. Major's soap-box or the war of "Jennifer's ear". One can never, or hardly ever, have a single issue election. Nor, in general, would one wish to have such an election. However, there are single issues of such importance that they deserve to be put not only to Parliament, which is elected on a multitude of issues, but to the people as a whole. That particularly applies to major constitutional changes which are in effect irreversible. I am not saying that irreversible changes should never be made. I am simply saying that they should not be made without the express agreement of the nation.

We shall no doubt be told that the issues are too complicated and difficult to be put to the public and that they will not be able to understand what it is all about. If a referendum on Maastricht can be held in Eire, Denmark and France without any complaints that it was too obscurely worded or that people did not know what they were voting for, surely it cannot be beyond the wit of a British Government to achieve the same.

During the discussion about the Statement on Maastricht on Monday in your Lordships' House it is recorded at col. 928 of Hansard that my noble friends Lord Harmar-Nicholls and Lady Chalker both said it would be desirable for noble Lords to be adult and sensible in considering this matter. Ought not the Government to recognise that the British public by and large are adult and sensible and are perfectly capable of making up their own minds in a coherent fashion on the subject of Maastricht?

House of Lords, 17 February 1993

http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/lords/1993/feb/17/maastricht-treaty#S5LV0542P0_19930217_HOL_201

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All original material is copyright of its author. Fair use permitted. Contact via comment. Unless indicated otherwise, all internet links accessed at time of writing. Nothing here should be taken as personal advice, financial or otherwise. No liability is accepted for third-party content, whether incorporated in or linked to this blog; or for unintentional error and inaccuracy. The blog author may have, or intend to change, a personal position in any stock or other kind of investment mentioned.