The Great Deception: A Secret History of the European Union

Rating:
Summary: Excellent study of EU attempt to destroy Britain
Review: This is a remarkable and well-researched history of the European Union from its origins immediately after the First World War to its present efforts to give itself a Constitution. The book lays bare the tactics of the quislings who are more loyal to the EU than to Britain, the Tory Europhiles, for example, who split their own party to assist the more Europhile Labour Party to win the 1997 election.

The EU is not about sharing or cooperation between sovereign governments. It is not inter-governmental, but supranational. The dividing line is the veto: where there are vetoes, there is inter-governmentalism; with vetoes gone, there is only a new, supranational form of government "beyond the control of national governments, politicians or electorates. Nation states, governments and parliaments could be left in place: but only so that they could gradually become subordinated to a new supranational government which was above them all." It has been a slow-motion coup d'etat.

The single currency was designed to unite the new state: as the EU's founder Jean Monnet said, "Via money Europe could become political in five years." German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer said, "Currency, security and constitution, those are the three essential components of the sovereignty of modern nation states, and the introduction of the euro constituted the first move towards their communitarisation in the EU." EU President Romano Prodi said, "The Single Market was the theme of the 80s; the single currency was the theme of the 90s; we must now face the difficult task of moving towards a single economy and political unity."

How has EU membership affected Britain? Our industries have become expendable; for example, at the time of entry, a senior civil servant in the Scottish fisheries department advised ministers not to go into any detail on the damage caused to the fishing industry: "The more one is drawn into such explanations, the more difficult it is to avoid exposing the weaknesses of the inshore fisheries position, the only answer to which may be that in the wider context they must be regarded as expendable."

We do not need the EU. The National Institute for Economic and Social Research found that withdrawing from the EU would not cost jobs. The Independent reported this as '8 million jobs could be lost if Britain quits EU' (18 February 2000). The NIESR's director, Dr Martin Weale, responded that the Independent's claim was "absurd ... pure Goebbels. In many years of academic research I cannot recall such a wilful distortion of the facts." In the subsequent discussion, Gordon Brown claimed, "750,000 British companies export from Britain to Europe": the government's own figure was 18,000.

The British working class's resolute hostility to the euro has defeated that EU attack. The EU's rulers and their quislings are coming back at us by trying to ram through their new Constitution and by imposing regionalisation. We must reject these assaults too.