“A state built on deception is not worth having”

A state built on deception is not worth having

Says David Pryce-Jones of the way the European Union is being made official by avoiding the consent of the populous through the use of the Lisbon Treaty.

The French and the Dutch did actually vote to reject the treaty, but their rulers simply ignored that fact. In Britain, Mr. Blair promised to hold a referendum, but then with no apparent strain on his conscience decided not to, leaving his successor to sign up to it without the legitimacy to do so. The majority of European governments have followed this path, cheating their electorates one by one, moreover keeping them in the dark as though they were Romanov or Habsburg emperors, and politics were some private domain about which voters should not be consulted.

Which is the same ideological trap that also got some of them into totalitarian Communist leftism, and others under totalitarian Fascist leftism. Pick your totalitarian leftism, folks. You know it comes naturally to you!

In normal circumstances, democracies will not tolerate trickery of the kind. Treated with such open contempt, genuine electorates take to the streets and build barricades and start burning institutions that do not represent them. A state built on deception is not worth having, and for the future it looks as if force alone will be able to maintain it. Europe is set either to collapse with unimaginable consequences or harden into some sort of authoritarian monster.

Utterly unaware of the great breakthrough that finally came along in the late 20th century, they remain obsessed with class, something that effectively ceased to exist in any effective form (it was defeated by a comfortable, meritocratic view of people, and capitalism), and fixated on a continuing fear of federalism and any kind of pluralism that appears to be anything more than a Potemkin village of democracy.