Europe's balkanisation has already begun

'The sick man of Europe' is a term that has been used to describe, among others, the late Ottoman Empire and Britain in the 1970s (incidentally during Labour's last tenure of government).

I would say this term is no longer relevant - Europe is itself the sick man. In the last six months we have seen strikes and riots rock the continent as the EU's rigid economic system struggles to cope with the financial crisis; we have seen a quangocrat and a 'low grade bank clerk' elected by nobody to represent us; and democracy trampled on in another Brussels power-grab.

We have to ask ourselves how much longer we wish to share membership of an organisation which has, on one extreme, a socialist government that has handled its finances so poorly that it is on the verge of bankruptcy; and on the other a corrupt billionaire plutocrat who, apart from owning large swathes of his country's media, has made himself essentially immune from prosecution while conniving with his equally repulsive counterpart and friend in Moscow to persecute the family of Alexander Litvinenko.

Thankfully David Cameron, Václav Claus and Michał Kamiński already asked themselves this question, taking the courageous decision to form the European Conservatives & Reformists Group.

It would be interesting to see how bad things really have to get before any of these men wholeheartedly put their weight behind outright secession.

In the case of Italy the 'European pattern' is disturbingly familiar. The Prime Minister can now legitimately claim he is too busy to attend court hearings in which he is being prosecuted, making him effectively above the law. This is remarkable because the Italian legislature actually handed him this immunity on a plate.

The parallel with the Roman Senate sycophantically ceding more and more of its power to the caesars is disturbing, but accurate. As President, the Communist Giorgio Napolitano ought to step in, but has so far done nothing. Those monarchists who claim the Queen would refuse to ratify any undemocratic or unconstitutional legislation would do well to learn from this - Napolitano's role is essentially the same and just as toothless.

Berlusconi's flagrant abuse of his position highlights the weakness of the European Union but also its own superficial commitment to democracy. A body which forced the Irish to reconsider their decision on the Lisbon Treaty is unlikely to make its voice heard over the collapse of the rule of law in Italy. The concept has simply never gained any currency in Europe.

Though, harrowing as Italy's situation is (Tatiana Litvinenko's "I thought Europe had 100% rule of law" ought to be invoked at every session of the European Parliament), it is Greece that runs the risk of seriously destabilising the continent. The question over whether to bail out the country with taxpayers' money has already caused conflict between member states and resentment among their electorates.

Of all publications, it was the Independent that ran a piece on why the euro was to blame for the strikes that exploded over Greece and Europe earlier this year. The following paragraph, a stinging indictment of the single currency, is worth printing here in full (my emphasis);

During the relatively benign economic conditions that marked the first decade of the euro, fast growing economies such as Spain were able to enjoy the advantages of currency union, such as low interest rates, but allowed their prices and costs to gradually rise, leaving their economies uncompetitive by comparison with nations such as Germany. Traditionally, that cumulative build-up of cost and price differences would be dealt with by devaluation of the currency, but membership of the euro removes that flexibility. Thus Ireland, Greece , Spain and others are undergoing what economists euphemistically call "internal devaluation", slashing wages and costs and, if necessary, allowing unemployment to climb to record highs. The problem raised by the Nobel prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz among others, is that those deflationary polices threaten to shrink their economies even more, triggering an even more urgent budget crisis as tax revenues collapse and unemployment payments rise.

I couldn't have put it better myself. Though perhaps more ominous was: "The democratic strains in nations that had been ruled, well within living memory, by fascist leaders or the military are growing."

It appears that the Federalists have learnt nothing from the Balkan conflict. The horrors of war and genocide in the former Yugoslavia ought to have taught the world, and especially Europe, that forcing people even as ethnically similar as the South Slavs into one political entity serves only to exasperate the differences between them.

It is one of those bizarre twists of history that a people who fought so bloodily to tear the Yugoslav union apart should be striving so hard to join a new one in from Brussels. The Yugoslav wars have shown us that multiethnic unions without dictatorial lynchpins like Tito make nationalism and ethnic conflict more, not less, likely.

So it is with great sadness that I receive the Liberal MEP and former Belgian Prime Minister Guy Verhofstadt's announcement that "The ultimate consequences of identity politics are the gas chambers of Auschwitz" (thanks to Dan Hannan for drawing attention to this). More still to hear that this Nazi analogy is frequently thrown at eurosceptics in Brussels.

The sad thing is the Federalists really cannot see what they are doing. In binding nations with very different economies into a single currency with single interest rates they are manufacturing financial collapse and industrial unrest - fertile soil for for nationalism and extremism to grow.

Worse still, their efforts to redress the problem are fermenting resentment between member states and their electors - who they have already shown their contempt for by their shameful dismissal of Lisbon referendums.

I know I will be mocked for predicting the EU causing the next European war and honestly, I pray that I'm wrong. But Britons should bear in mind that where, in the past, we have always had the option of staying out of such conflicts, we are now directly involved. Right at the heart of Europe, as Tony Blair used to say.

Don't cry over Cadbury; there are far greater institutions under threat

The sale of Cadbury last week to US 'plastic cheese-making' conglomerate Kraft has resonated an astounding level of emotion (and news coverage) amongst the proud chocolate-loving peoples of Great Britain. And rightly so. Cadbury is a national treasure, a shining and very British beacon for responsible, philanthropic entrepreneurial capitalism.

In a way I suppose we hoped it might never happen. We wanted to believe that this proud company, founded by those good Quaker types in 1824 would limp on through the recession and recover its strength on the other side. It's been through worse, right? One hundred and eighty-four more years!

Sadly, it was not to be. Comparable perhaps to the grief of a family who have just lost one of their own to a new life in the colonies, we have had to accept that Cadbury is now essentially an American company. Goodbye, old bean. You are now to Kraft what Rowntree Mackintosh is to Swiss giant Nestlé.

But hang on a minute... We still have Kit Kats don't we? You can still buy tins of Quality Streets with the famous Mackintosh toffee penny, right? What are we so hung up about?

Well, I can't put it as well as Boris Johnson, but there are two primary concerns I believe may explain why Kraft's bid has been so unpopular, not least with Cadbury itself. One is that Kraft was seen as being unlikely to respect the ethos of the company and would meddle in its working practices, perhaps laying off workers in the process.

Another is that the much-loved Cadbury recipe would be tampered with, perhaps into the fatty, sugary mulch that so excites the over stimulated American taste-bud; turning it into a cheaper, lower quality product.

What do those Yanks care about our chocolate anyway? They're only concerned with balance-sheets right? I too have had such a worry. After all, I was only three years old when Nestlé bought Rowntree Mackintosh, but I swear Yorkies didn't taste so much of sugar and lard when I was a nipper.

There is another dimension to this matter however, a concern I happened to catch broadcast on BBC News following confirmation of the sale. This concern quite rightly revolves around the concerns of Cadbury's staff, who - with the changeover - are fearing for their jobs and the working practices they have become accustomed to.

But we've covered this already. The angle the BBC put on the matter was that, with so many British firms now in foreign hands, the country is losing control of its economic levers. Their claim is that British workers would be vulnerable to Kraft laying off foreign rather than domestic workers - that, in a way we would be relinquishing our ability to control our employment statistics and even the welfare of our own people.

Oh dear. This smells suspiciously like 'British jobs for British workers' again. The foul stench of that national socialism the BNP have made so much their own of late. That populist drivel the Prime Minister was so keen to associate himself with in 2007, then drop like a lead balloon following the fascists' endorsement.

But this is beside the point. What really stings me is the gross hypocrisy of this position. Why is it that the BBC are so happy to present the sale of Cadbury to an American company in terms of a loss of control over the economy to foreigners - an issue of sovereignty if ever there was one - yet fail to report how busily engaged we are relinquishing far more important economic, financial, even democratic controls to unelected bureaucrats in Brussels? To report one at the expense of the other is simply madness.

Madness perhaps, or ulterior motive. Is the BBC's position really about sovereignty? Is it really about job losses when the EU is threatening our ability to control inflation and interest rates? Depriving us of the right to self-regulate the lynchpin of our international economy?

Or is that they do not report our loss of sovereignty to Brussels because, like Labour, they have resigned themselves to discarding democracy in order to stealthily impose their shared agenda onto the British people?

As Roy Hattersley explained in 1992; 'Labour has converted to Europe because Europe has converted to socialism'. Perhaps what he meant was that Labour has sold its soul because Europe has converted to socialism.

How has this country got to such a point? Only last week the press also saw it fit to publicise the views of a surgeon so lacking in respect and understanding of the basic foundations of liberal democracy that, with an entirely straight face, he called for the banning of butter.

What madness is this? What fever hangs over the minds of our broadcasters? I was initially rendered speechless, yet even now find it difficult in mustering the words to counter such an insane argument. The totalitarians among us must be absolutely elated.

It's a sad irony indeed that the liberalism of the 1960s which so raged against the 'ban this filth' Mary Whitehouses of this world should have bred such a socially intolerant and reactionary political class today. The unholy alliance of the far left and extremist muslims is an acute example of this.

What has happened to liberty? To democracy? To 'trust the people'? Are these just fusty old eighteenth century ideas? I tell you, if the Conservatives cannot in government invigorate our democracy, reclaim it from Brussels and reverse this totalitarian nanny culture at home then I am afraid to say they have very little use to us at all.

"Those whom the gods wish to destroy they first make mad."

Britain must stand up to the bullies in Brussels and in Washington

We are quite accustomed in this country to the idea of Americans not really knowing what they're talking about, reducing all things down to their simplest forms and generally being a little slow on the uptake. This caricature of the ignorant American may be somewhat unfair to the American people themselves, but I do not believe it is a wholly unfair assessment of the American media.

Case in point is a recent and rather depressing article by Roger Cohen of the New York Times highlighted by ConservativeHome yesterday. Sadly, Cohen's complete ignorance on European affairs and the nature of the European Union serves well to disguise his Oxford education (then again, Nick Griffin went to Cambridge...), while his entirely genuine and shameless assumption that all western nations exist to serve the United States marks him out very clearly as the archetypal American.

In fact it really is quite difficult to decide where to start with this spectacularly bad piece of journalism. Perhaps the part where he asserts that, in forming the European Conservatives & Reformists Group (ECR), Cameron was "bowing to his party's Euroskeptics [sic]" rather than pushing to its logical conclusion the established Conservative desire to reform the European Union (hence the name!) into something more accountable and democratic. This is something that the European People's Party has thus far lacked the political will - some might say intent - to tackle, making the establishment of the ECR something akin to common sense.

Or perhaps I should have started with Cohen's clear lack of primary research. This is very sloppy journalism indeed. He is, for example, quite happy to paint Poland's Law & Justice and Latvia's For Fatherland & Freedom as "right-wing fringe parties" and "Cameron's loopy European Parliament allies". He seems unaware however, that one of these 'loopy fringe parties' currently provides Poland with its sitting President, while the other participates in Latvia's present governing coalition. The idea that these two nations are governed the extremists on the lunatic fringe is something that must be wholly offensive and contemptible to the good people who elected them.

Indeed, Cohen's knowledge of the facts seems so sparse that apparently the mere mention of the name For Fatherland & Freedom is enough to make his case! ("These include a Polish politician who thinks apologizing to Jews for World War II massacres is a bad idea and a Latvian party called For Fatherland and Freedom"). This is clearly designed to evoke western images of Nazi Germany and Robert Harris' novel, despite the term 'fatherland' being very common and entirely acceptable in eastern Europe.

Then of course there is Michał Kamiński. Cohen astutely observes that, on David Miliband's desk there "lay highlighted articles from the Jewish Chronicle about Michal Kaminski of Poland’s Law and Justice Party", and that Kamiński "claims Poland should not have apologized for massacring hundreds of Jews at Jedwabne in Nazi-occupied Poland in 1941". Jews ought to be pretty mad about this, right?

Let me direct you to some quotations from an article by the Editor of the Jewish Chronicle, Stephen Pollard. Funnily enough, it's titled 'David Miliband's insult to Michal Kaminski is contemptible'. I would not normally quote at such length in an article, but these lies have been blown so out of proportion I believe it is necessary that I do so;

Mr Kaminski is a mainstream centre-right politician who would, were he British, fit naturally into the Atlanticist, free-market wing of the Conservative Party.

...there is simply no evidence that Mr Kaminski is an antisemite, only a series of politically motivated assertions. It is not Kaminski who is odious; it is those using antisemitism as a tool for their own political ends who deserve contempt.

Mr Kaminsk’s argument was that apologising for the collective guilt of Poles let the individual murderers off the hook. Far from trying to cover up the massacre, Mr Kaminski was using the president’s apology to make a wider point.

The massacre was not committed by “the Poles” against “the Jews”, but was a vile crime committed by specific individuals. The victims were not “Jews”, as if they were the stateless people declared by the Nazis, but fellow Poles.

A further accusation is that, in an interview, he said that he would apologise only if someone "from the Jewish side" apologises for what "the Jews" did during the Soviet occupation of eastern Poland from 1939 to 1941. Mr Kaminski flatly denies this, and no one has yet produced a shred of serious evidence to contradict him.

David Miliband owes him a grovelling apology.

He most certainly does. But the lies and mud-slinging do not end there. Both Cohen and Miliband flatly deny that there is any chance of a federal European state emerging any time in the future.

Now, I am not entirely against the idea of a a federal European Union in itself - indeed, Winston Churchill was an early advocate - but what really gets me are the constant bare-faced lies, denials and deceptions by our politicians. These began with Edward Heath in 1970 ("There is no question of any erosion of essential national sovereignty") and have continued to this day.

In Cohen's article, Miliband claims that the Conservatives are chasing "the phantom ghost of federalism", while Cohen bleats in agreement that "Tory little-Englandism has become a strange anachronism since the end of the Cold War dictated a broad Europe rather than a deep one, a loose bloc rather than a United States of Europe" (dictated by whom? How?). Miliband is either very innocent to the facts or just blatantly lying, but many of his European counterparts do not feel the need to keep up such a pretence.

Helmut Kohl for example - the former Christian Democrat chancellor of Germany - declared in 1997 that "We want the political unification of Europe." His Social Democratic successor Gerhard Schröder followed this in 1999 by stating that the introduction of the euro was "in no way just an economic decision. Monetary union is demanding that we Europeans press ahead resolutely with political integration."

These two politicians belong to the European Union's two largest political parties - the centre-right European People's Party and centre-left Party of European Socialists. This illustrates with extreme clarity the need for the ECR in the European Parliament if those opposed to federalism (and I assume this includes Miliband?) are to have their voices heard and their influence felt.

Not of course that this matters to the Americans. Cohen points out that "Under George W. Bush, friends were privileged. Under Obama, friends have ceded to American interests coldly assessed. And on issues from Afghanistan to climate change, Obama wants Europe to step forward." An article by the news weekly New Europe (featuring a disgustingly-used photograph of William Hague in mid-wave) goes on to ask "Could it be that the Americans best friends will not be the British, but the Germans? How will that affect Anglo-US relations?" before seemingly demolishing this concern by observing that "The ‘special relationship’ between Blair and Bush turned out to be more akin to the relationship between a dog and a lamppost."

This is, however what Anglo-American relations have always been since 1945. Any 'special relationship' has always been a personal one, not a political one. From Churchill & Truman to Thatcher & Reagan to Blair & Bush, it has only ever flourished between politicians, not states.

In reality the United States does not care about Britain and never has. Make no mistake, the fallacy of a 'special relationship' serves only two functions - to delude Britons into feeling they are important on the world stage and to serve the American national interest. Right now that national interest is Europe (though if the Americans believe that a strong EU will ever be strung along they are sadly mistaken), which means that both the 'special relationship' and our sovereign right to make our own decisions can go to hell. Obama wants us to fall into line so we'd better listen.

Now, perhaps paradoxically, I believe we ought to throw in our lot with Europe over America for this very reason, and so that we may strive to create the kind of union that as Conservatives we can whole-heartedly support. Only in doing so will we finally put to rest the lie of a special relationship between the United States and Britain. For let us not forget that this is a country that has consistently supported Irish republicanism in Northern Ireland and even at times the IRA. It is a nation that during the Suez crisis of 1956 sided with the dictatorial Abdul Nasser over her own British, French and Israeli allies - only for the Egyptian nationalist to repay the favour by aligning his country with the USSR!

It is true that we are not and never will be in a position to go it alone in the world isolated from Europe and America. Our imperial past and national character also prevent us from taking the road of nations such as Canada or Japan - quietly sitting a few rows back in politics while while still possessing financial clout. We need to be part of something greater.

So I say to you that we do not have a stake in the United States - that ended in 1783. So let's stop pretending and forget about it. We do however have a stake in Europe. This means that we have a duty to fight for the kind of union that we believe in - one that we can be an enthusiastic part of - and to stand up to the bullies who would deny us this, whether they come from Brussels or from Washington.

A salute to the heritage of the EU

It's recently come to my attention that euro bank notes are probably the only paper currency in the world that don't have any historical or monarchical figures on them. No doubt this is because it would be near impossible to find the appropriate historical figures without offending a good handful of nations whose forebears didn't quite make it. Indeed, this is the case right down to the bridges and 'gateways' featured on the notes, which aren't even real structures, lest they incur the petty jealousies of member states.

Hence I've taken it upon myself to come up with a solution for this predicament. In a multi- and supra-national state, it would be understandably difficult to come up with any criteria for a historical figure that could justify leaving many nations' heroes out. However, there is one that to me seems perfectly reasonable - all the men who have laid the groundwork for the EU by attempting to force European unity.

True, this hardly includes all member states, but it makes a damn good tour of the continent. Candidates come from as far as Italy, Germany, France, Austria, and even Turkey. All these nations have, at one time or another, had rulers who have attempted to force Europe together under a common yoke, whether they liked it or (as was most often the case) not. What better way, I ask you, to celebrate the heritage of this great European project than the tyrants and despots who set such a precedent for it?

Julius Cæsar (100-44 BC)

Charlemagne (742-814)

Suleiman I of the Ottoman Empire (1494-1566)

Charles V of the Holy Roman Empire (1500-1558)

Louis XIV of France (1638-1715)

Napoléon I of France (1769-1821)

Adolf Hitler (1889-1945)

Needless to say, most of these rulers (the exceptions being Cæsar and Charlemagne) failed in their ambitions to forcibly unite Europe. Usually this was a direct result of British intervention. I do hope the significance of this fact is not lost...