The Ends of Lisbon

Denigrating Conservative European policy is a central New Labour objective. Nothing could be more destructive of the Brown cabal's slipping hold on power in the United Kingdom than a European Union revision of the objectives of the Lisbon Treaty and a review of the form of European integration.

Mr Cameron has aligned the Conservative group in Europe with parties that espouse the model of a Europe with powerful national parliaments reviewing the national effects of European co-ordination and with reponsibility for member-state issues remaining with member- states. There is to be no more rubber stamping of European legislation brought about by emptying national parliaments' power into cross border regions' administrations, nor of refusing either responsibility for, or willingness to act upon, adverse results from Europe-wide legislation, by national parliaments. Not for Germany and if not for Germany then why for any other member-state?

The UK media New Labour propagandists harp on the urgency of Lisbon, the concern that it should be operating by the end of this year, the irrelevance of the lingering pockets of opposition, the small formalities that remain to be completed, the uniqueness of the Lisbon constitutional solution to European problems of identity, of its taking its place in the world. It all sounds a bit like wanting a federal Europe to embrace an old-fashioned warmongering attitude to the rest of the world. Europe, New Labour's apologists argue, must be able to respond under one command to terrorist problems and to threats to our interests. Europe must respond as one to climate change. Europe needs more permanence in its leadership to tackle recession with co-ordinated measures. Well, no actually.

All this guff is so last century. A vainglorious rebuilding of the various empires that have held Europe together by the use of force for the benefit of a particular power elite, usually geographically based, since imperial Rome. Only last century we fought ourselves to a standstill, the dead counted in hundreds of millions, the destruction of wealth and culture a horror we can barely comprehend and certainly don't want to look at often, as elites tried to establish a new European state. What we have now works well. Works well, that is, where the people of the various member-states have the means to express their views to the highest level, and means to seek and obtain redress when the Executive oversteps its powers, or attempts to claim powers without obvious ownership. In most European countries the line of control encloses power and its use very clearly. But not in ours with an Executive determined on abuse. We know the current Europe works well (even if not for the United Kingdom, but it was never designed for us anyway and we paid an enormous fee to enter at all) because in 2005 half of Europe voted for the status quo and threw out the precursor of the Lisbon Treaty.

Romano Prodi, leader of the progressive governance Italian coalition, and Europeanista to the core, had Giuliano Amato, constitutional lawyer, political scientist, socialist, il Dottor' Sottile, recast the rejected treaty, and we were denied any further, direct rejecting vote on the resulting rehash. Since then there has been a steady voting, nationally, to the right, the use of democratic power before it is lost to us all, to get rid of national governments that seek permanent power through a particular European restructuring. Affirmation of the rejection of post democratic progressive governance (the Project) is found in Spain where Aznar, who led the party of the openly corporatist but, in Spain's case, of the right, and was seeking a European permanent administration for Spain, was defeated. The Italian-inspired elites vision of a new Rome is excusable in them but wholly rejected by Italian voters who infinitely prefer Berlusconi and the chance to make a fortune, and throw out those who were stopping them. The cost of the grand coalition to Angela Merkel was the driving through of Amato's Lisbon Treaty. As the prospect of a homogeneous government of the right blossoms for September, Germany withdraws from the Social Democratic and socialist nightmare of excluding conservatives from power for ever using the European Union - a Project as ambitious as it is deluded and disgraceful.

The lie that Europe is desperate for Lisbon is, in the UK, a New Labour Project lie. A centre right, peaceful, wealthy Europe, assertive of its various cultures and freedoms, assertive while open and co-operative towards Russia, America, and the Asian powers is proving to be a popular way of being among European voters. Of course it's a disaster for centre left authoritarians, for global governance, for the shepherds and their flocks view of how to run the world.

Mandelson and Brown are actually trying to bully Europe into saving their skins. We knew that they are big-headed, deluded, addicted to power and status, but in that condition they are patsies for Sarkozy and the funding of the cleaning up of the French nuclear mess, for Merkel and the funding of the European car industry and maintenance of industrial peace and manufacturing capacity in central Europe, for any member-state that likes to have lots of state-raised cash diverted to green issues, which should be translated as maintaining beautiful but expensive countryside and its owners. The list of uses for the UK within the EU, with the UK under such a regime of fools, can be extended by most of us.

Lisbon was socialism and state planning's last chance. Now national European leaders are taking everything there is to be got from a desperate United Kingdom regime whose demise, or democratic disgrace, without Lisbon is a certainty