With chilling candour, a paper from a senior government official laid out the
difficulties that Britain would face in the proposed Common Market.


The Greek disturbances and national strike are the most vehement expressions so far of Europeans’ political disaffection


All across Europe, from riots in Greece to those protest votes for Marine Le
Pen and George Galloway, we see signs of how alienated people now feel from
the “political class” which rules over our lives, out of touch with the rest
of us, without meaningful opposition, no longer responsive to any democratic
control. I am reminded of a document I discovered in the National Archives
at Kew in January 2002, when sifting through papers released under the
30-year rule relating to Britain’s negotiations to join the Common Market.
It was a confidential 1971 memorandum, clearly written by a senior Foreign
Office official, headed “Sovereignty and the Community”.


With chilling candour, this paper (from FCO folder 30/1048) predicted that it
would take 30 years for the British people to wake up to the real nature of
the European project that Edward Heath was about to take them into, by which
time it would be too late for them to leave. Its author made clear that the
Community was headed for economic, monetary and fiscal union, with a common
foreign and defence policy, which would constitute the greatest surrender of
Britain’s national sovereignty in history. Since “Community law” would take
precedence over our own, ever more power would pass to this new bureaucratic
system centred in Brussels – and, as the role of Parliament diminished, this
would lead to a “popular feeling of alienation from government”.


It would therefore become the duty of politicians “not to exacerbate public
concern by attributing unpopular measures… to the remote and unmanageable
workings of the Community”. Politicians of all parties should be careful to
conceal the fact that controversial laws originated in Brussels. By this
means it might be possible to preserve the illusion that the British
government was still sovereign, “for this century at least” – by which time
it would no longer be possible for us to leave.


In other words, here was a civil servant advising that our politicians should
connive in concealing what Heath was letting us in for, not least in hiding
the extent to which Britain would no longer be a democratic country but one
essentially governed by unelected and unaccountable officials.


One way to create an illusion that this system was still democratic, this
anonymous mandarin suggested, would be to give people the chance to vote for
new representatives at European, regional and local levels. A few years
later, we saw the creation of an elected European Parliament – as we see
today a craze for introducing elected mayors, as meaningless local
figureheads.

But where the author was perhaps shrewder than he knew was in predicting how
all this would eventually lead to “we the people” feeling alienated from the
whole process of how we are governed. We now see a gulf yawning between, on
the one hand, the consensus government of our new nomenklatura and, on the
other, all the rest of us, aware that we are democratically powerless. To
the growing groundswell of contempt and resentment that this is creating,
those who rule us with such sublime incompetence will eventually find they
have no answer.


Anyone wishing to read the relevant document may find it, with commentary, at
http://www.eureferendum.com

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/9233096/Europe-alienates-us-all-as-foretold-40-years-ago.html