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We are the first generation of Europeans who have never had to defend their freedom.
As a consequence, we now take freedom so much for granted
it has become a root assumption about reality,
so that, even when we can see it being taken away from us, we simply don't believe it.
The Euro bailout fiasco is proving that you can't make a currency omelette
without wrecking a few economies,
but still by far the most worthless currency in Europe today is the vote.
A wheelbarrow full of votes won't buy you a say in the lawmaking process,
and that's why this crisis is happening.
It's also why Europe needs a revolution.
Nothing as crude as an armed uprising - I'm not suggesting anything like that.
I mean a real revolution of public will and intent
to restore the power of the ballot box to the people from whom it has been stolen,
because, at the risk of sounding like an extremist,
there is nothing wrong with Europe today that couldn't be cured by more democracy.
It's ironic that just as the Arabs are finally claiming their right to self-determination
we in Europe are busy handing ours away,
or rather we're having it signed away by a political class
who openly despise the people they purport to represent.
Soon the Arabs will be lecturing us on democracy.
The artificial single currency is regarded as an essential prelude
to full undemocratic political union in Europe,
and Germany has done more than any country to prop it up,
because, as the Chancellor said, it's Germany's "historic duty to protect the Euro".
This is eurospeak for residual war guilt.
The Germans don't have a historic duty to do anything except mind their own business
and maybe make a point of staying out of Poland.
If I was German, I would resent my government's desire to keep making amends for something
that had nothing to do with anyone alive today, and to pay for it with my money.
The best thing Germany can do for other countries is to let them stand on their own feet.
As it is, the German government is creating a mini economic empire of vassal states,
and setting its country up to be hated and resented all over again.
Nice work, Mrs Merkel.
The European Union is not, in fact, a union at all,
but a continent-wide political coup.
What began as a common market has now metamorphosed by stealth
into a supranational political dictatorship,
a parasitical organism living on the backs of the European nation states,
sucking their lifeblood and slowly killing them off;
a bureaucratic tyranny that wants to "harmonise" out of existence
the national identities that have made Europe a continent of genuine diversity
and a cultural crucible whose values have shaped the entire western world.
But they want to put a stop to all that in the European Union of Soviet Socialist Republics,
and this is why European laws are never enacted in response to
any kind of organic need in society,
but as top-down directives intended to impose indiscriminate uniformity for its own sake.
More than fifty percent of British law is now made this way
by people we haven't elected and can't remove,
and, as they can override our elected politicians whenever they like,
it's only a matter of time before it's a hundred percent.
We pay the European Union more than fifteen billion pounds a year, and rising.
That's more than twice all the public service cuts combined.
We squander that every year, and all we get for it is ordered around.
Thanks to unqualified and politically motivated European judges,
we can no longer deport foreign terrorists and criminals from Britain,
no matter what crimes they've committed, in case it violates their human rights.
Yet, under the European Arrest Warrant, a British citizen can be extradited
on no evidence, to face charges that are not even crimes in Britain,
and to be held without charge for months in appalling conditions
without anyone having made a case against them. No human rights for them.
And British judges can do nothing about this, even if they want to -
which they seldom do, to be fair.
And not one of the three main political parties in Britain is prepared to give the people
a chance to have a say about any of this, because they know damn well what we would say.
I'm beginning to understand how Americans must have felt living under King George.
What was that again - no taxation without representation?
The War of Independence wasn't America against England.
It was Englishmen resisting the oppressive regime of their autocratic German king -
asserting their human rights, in modern parlance.
America may be a melting pot now, but it began with a defence of age old English liberties,
liberties that were promptly written into the Constitution - something we never got around to doing in Britain,
so we no longer enjoy the same liberties Americans do.
We don't have a constitution. We don't have a first amendment.
What we have, and what the whole of Europe has, is the Lisbon Treaty,
a kind of top-down constitution that has been imposed on us against our will.
And, unlike the American Constitution which empowers the people,
the European constitution disempowers the people,
and empowers the unelected bureaucrats
and career politicians for whose sole benefit it was created.
Whatever the reality of the Republican-Democrat stitch-up,
America is still governed, at least in theory,
by the people and for the people. No such pretence exists any more in Europe
where the people have had to stand by watching helplessly, their protests ignored,
as their elected representatives sign away their sovereignty
and their franchise without permission,
and burden them with a mountain of phoney debt they didn't incur.
If a lawyer or an accountant behaved like this, they would end up in prison,
but the political class get away with it because they make up the rules as they go along.
They are literally a law unto themselves.
The ink was barely dry on the wretched Lisbon Treaty
when they were violating its terms to throw even more of other people's money
at economies they have destroyed.
Most of these people have never had a proper job outside politics,
and it shows.
They inhabit a bubble of their own creation, like a priesthood,
and, in taking away the power of the ballot box, as they have,
they've removed the people's ability to prick that bubble
and let in a little reality.
In short, they've stolen our birthright, and that of our children and grandchildren,
and that's why Europe needs a revolution.
And if ultimately these criminals are not held to account
by the law, as they ought to be,
they will certainly be held to account by history
as the generation that tried to snuff out democracy in Europe.
A generation of traitors, of incompetent self-serving political pipsqueaks
who call themselves leaders, yet who have shown that
they wouldn't know how to lead a pack of lemmings straight over a cliff.
Actually, I take that back. That's exactly what they are doing.
Peace, and happy landings.