The Czech Constitution Guarantees Czech Sovereignty Over Lisbon. Does Ours?

The ruling that the Czech constitution is robust enough to defend Czech sovereignty in its interaction with the Lisbon treaty is good news for Czechs but reflects badly on our own. The United Kingdom is the only member state of the European Union sent naked into the conference chamber (to borrow a phrase from a Labour pantheon member).

David Cameron has still not set out a manifesto for the construction and reconstruction of a British Constitution at least as robust as that of the other 26 member states of the federated European Union. Not talk of the repatriation of powers, not talk of constitutionally insignificant and irrelevant referendums, not mention of negotiation either friendly and constructive or obstructive and bolshie; what is needed are clearly set out proposals for providing the United Kingdom with rules for its conduct that match those of our fellow Europeans.

While he is at it he might pay attention to the internal federation of the United Kingdom itself. There is a gross lack of internal democracy within the UK that is due largely to the former dominance of England within the federation of the British Isles. Once the English ran the whole show. Now they do not but the paradigm has been particularly malignant in informing attitudes to the European Union. There was an expectation that the UK, and for the UK read England, would run Europe much as England ran the UK - after all, we won the war innit, well with some assistance from America but we've got a special relationship, right? Remember at the heart of Europe?

Only we aren't, are we? Outside the euro, outside Schengen, outside the European social model - outsiders - facing a lot of unfinished post War business and a very different view of England's behaviour in Europe than the propaganda history we still promulgate in our schools and trash media. Europeans have a lot of stuff to sort out, and it won't be solved with the impositions of 60 years ago. Out of money and credibility too. And with our candidate for European high office a warmonger and war criminal of the centre left in a Europe where the centre right predominates. There is a famous photograph of a Berlin banana seller offering a banana to a small child; he would doubtless be more competent at foreign relations than the self-hating everything banana- offerer that is being put forward as a serious contender to conduct European Union foreign relations (to which England's constitutionally unprotected statehood will be subject).

Right now, the only thing that is holding together the United Kingdom economy, its currency, and any hope of avoiding a devastating depression - not recession but full blown depression - is the expectation of a reassertion of democracy and the election of a sane government in the United Kingdom. That is a respectable government, elected, in correct relations with the permanent state and its other aspects of law and legislature. A sane government that recognises the straits we are in, not blinded by an obsessive, childlike denial of wrongdoing, and will cope with our dreadful debt and frightening isolation from our neighbours and former friends. A clean government that is untainted by the corruption of a bribed legislature, a subverted civil service, a shadow administration of appointed cronies, a civilian surveillance without redress from maladministration and bullying by apparatchik appointees.

England is more than a peripheral power in Europe. We were once well-regarded and rightly seen as a model of informal, as well as constitutionally enforceable, decencies. Mr Cameron and his party need to set out some very clear plans to reinstate our country's decencies and ensure that in our relations with other federations, both local and European, we can be ourselves and pay our debts.


On reflection

It is just as important that the centre left in England should set out its proposals for protecting the sovereignty of the United Kingdom, and for resolving the problems of its internal federation. But to do so would require the removal of a Labour Executive premised on and wholly committed to the installation of what has been called authoritarian capitalism (there are older fashioned names but let's move on). The social democratic movement in the UK has been unable to dislodge the authoritarian Executive by any means open to them within Labour party structures. All attempts at dissuading the Labour authoritarian Executive from illegal wars, the introduction of unbearable levels of social, and private familial surveillance, the removal of constitutionally safeguarded civil liberties, the disempowering of the judiciary and the legislature, the construction of a client state coupled with crippling levels of direct and indirect taxation (and tax payer looting by Executive friendly operators but that's another matter), the identification of the Executive with the permanent state, have failed.

Obviously just as many social democrats in the UK have been abused and defrauded as people on the centre right. The problem is they cannot protect both the centre left and dethrone their 'leaders' to reinstate a decent party and movement. Only the whole electorate can do that.