2013.11.29 The Telegraph, Daniel Hannan: The single most objectionable thing about the EU (in a crowded field)
Shall I tell you the worst thing about the EU? It’s not the waste or the corruption or the Michelin-starred lifestyles of its leaders. It’s not the contempt for voters or the readiness to swat referendum results aside. It’s not the way that multi-nationals and NGOs and all manner of corporate interests are privileged over consumers. It’s not the pettifogging rules that plague small employers. It’s not the Common Agricultural Policy or the Common Fisheries Policy. It’s not the anti-Britishness or the anti-Americanism. It’s not even the way in which the euro is inflicting preventable poverty on tens of millions of southern Europeans.Pateikia iškalbingą seriją tikrų ES statizmo faktų, tą dalį praleidžiu - skaitykite originale. Baigia:
No, it’s something more objectionable than any of these things – and something which, bizarrely, doesn’t exercise us nearly as much as it should. Put simply, it’s this: the EU makes up the rules as it goes along.
Just think, for a moment, about what that means. It means that any deal you’ve signed can be arbitrarily altered later. It means that any plans you’ve made, on the basis of what you took to be binding agreements, can be retrospectively destroyed. It means, in short, that there is no effective rule of law.
Consider one current example: a breach of the law so flagrant, so brazen, that it ought to stir a free people to revolt – and yet which has received only the paltriest attention.
When the European Constitution Lisbon Treaty was negotiated, Britain secured an opt-out from elements of it, notably the EU’s Charter of Fundamental Rights. This opt-out was no token. It was repeatedly described by ministers as a “red line”: an issue on which, in other words, they must get their way if they were to sign up to the treaty at all. The opt-out was brandished as a major victory for the Labour government. Indeed, the PM cited it in Parliament as a reason not to concede the public vote he had earlier promised.
Here is Tony Blair at the Despatch Box on 25 June, 2007:
It is absolutely clear that we have an opt-out from both the charter and judicial and home affairs. Those were the reasons why people like the right hon. Gentleman were saying that they wanted a referendum.Pretty unequivocal, no? The EU’s human rights code would not be justiciable in the UK. Euro-judges wouldn’t be able to impose it on us. It didn’t take long for Brussels to go back on the deal. In a series of rulings, the European Court of Justice drew explicitly on the Charter to force its decisions on Britain.
Anglosphere exceptionalism is summed up in the words John Adams used when designing the Massachusetts state constitution: “a government of laws not of men”. Actually, the phrase wasn’t Adams’s: he was quoting a seventeenth-century English radical called James Harrington – a reminder of the deep roots of our shared Anglosphere liberties. But the point holds: the Anglosphere miracle lies in the elevation of the law above the state rather than the other way around. How sad that, debilitated by 40 years of EU membership, we appear to have dropped that principle.Tekstas išimtinai apie suzerenitetą. Privilegiją valstybių lygmenyje kitiems primetinėti taisykles, kurių patiems laikytis galima tol, kol naudinga.
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