Roger Helmer MEP

The High Court has just decided that a petitioner, Stuart Wheeler, can pursue a judicial review of the government’s decision not to hold a referendum on the Renamed European Constitution, or Lisbon Treaty.
 
Stuart Wheeler, former owner of the spread betting business IG index and a major donor to the Conservative Party, took a case to the High Court on April 22nd, arguing that the government’s breach of its Manifesto Commitment to a referendum had denied him and other electors their “reasonable expectation”, and should therefore be subject to Judicial Review.  Mr. Justice Owen reserved judgement in the case, but at 10:00 a.m. on May 2nd he delivered his judgement.  He agreed with the plaintiff and authorised a Judicial Review.  The government will now have to justify breaking its word, in open court.
 
This is a triumph for common sense and good governance.  It was outrageous that the government should renege on a manifesto promise, and I am delighted they are to be called to account.
 
The expectation is that at least the judicial review process will delay the UK’s ratification of the Treaty.  It is possible that the outcome of the Review could be a requirement that the government make good its commitment to a referendum.  Repeated opinion polls, and other tests of opinion including village polls and a large-scale postal ballot in the East Midlands (in Gedling, Notts), suggest that 80%+ of electors favour a referendum, and that the great majority oppose the EU Treaty.  The decision regarding a Judicial Review in the UK could also influence the Irish referendum on the Treaty, expected in June.

Roger addresses the Youth Wing of the Ludwig von Mises Institute in Brussels in April.  This is an Austrian libertarian think-tank that promotes liberty and free markets.  The meeting took place in the congenial premises of the European Beer Association.  He apologises for the flag, which was placed by the organisers.

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The following piece was written by my good friend and colleague Dan Hannan MEP, and I was so impressed with it that (with his permission) I decided to post it here.

Key Quote: “Where the US constitution is chiefly about the rights of the individual, the European one is chiefly about the power of the state”.

1. The European Constitution / Lisbon Treaty will strengthen the EU’s common foreign policy.
Is this in the interests of the United States? In recent years the EU has:
· Declared its intention to sell arms to Beijing
· Pursued a policy of “constructive engagement” towards the ayatollahs in Teheran
· Withdrawn its recognition from the anti-Castro dissidents in Cuba
· Continued to funnel money to Hamas-controlled territory through intermediaries and NGOs, so as to stay within the letter of its own law on financing terrorist organisations
There is a reason why the EU and the US take different positions on these and other issues. In all these cases, the US favours democracy, the EU stability.

2. The European Constitution was rejected at the ballot box
There is a reason that the EU tends to be more accommodating towards authoritarian regimes than the US. Its leaders are often lukewarm about democracy — or “populism” as they call it, when it produces results they don’t like. The European Constitution was voted down overwhelmingly in two referendums in 2005: by 55 per cent of French voters and 62 per cent of Dutch voters. Instead of accepting the result, EU leaders simply pushed ahead with ratifying the same document, making what Angela Merkel referred to in a leaked memo as “the necessary presentational changes” and altering its name to “Lisbon Treaty”. All EU leaders accept that the two documents are essentially the same. The only one who denies it is Gordon Brown, because he doesn’t want to hold the referendum he promised at the last election.

3. It would be rejected again
Eight EU governments promised their peoples referendums on the treaty. Seven have reneged. Only Ireland, whose national constitution requires plebiscites on questions of constitutional change, is giving its people a vote. The reason the other referendums have been cancelled is simple: people would vote “No” again.

4. It’s a bad constitution
The United States Constitution contains 4,550 words in the original draft, 7,600 with all 27 amendments. The European Constitution/Lisbon Treaty has 76,250 words. Where the US constitution is chiefly about the rights of the individual, the European one is chiefly about the power of the state. Where the American concerns itself with delineating the powers of the various institutions, the European busies itself with interfering in every aspect of the everyday lives of our citizens.

5. International judicial activism
The EU is as much a construct of its judges as of its legislators. European integration has advanced through a series of contentious rulings by the European Court of Justice. These are now forming a corpus of international law which judges in every country, including the US, are recognising in their own precedents.

It’s unfashionable to quote Kipling, so I will.  I have recently acquired a rather nice Folio Society edition of Kipling’s selected verse. In his wonderful poem  “The Ballad of East and West” we find this splendid line: “So thou  must eat the White Queen’s meat, and all her foes are thine”.  That,  broadly speaking, is what we in Britain have said to the Gurkhas, and  they have eaten the White Queen’s meat, and fought in the White  Queen’s wars, for more decades than I care to remember.  They have  done so, broadly speaking, with courage, and discipline, and  determination, not least in the Falklands War, where the rumour of their coming and the threat of their kukris struck terror into the  hearts of the Argentines.
 
With little publicity, they continue to contribute honourably to today’s campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan.

We used to let them go home on rather modest pensions.  Since 1997, we have  improved their pensions.  And we have allowed those who left the  service recently to settle in England.  But we deny those rights to  Gurkhas who left the service more than a decade ago. This is  shameful.  Surely those who fought in the British Army, in Britain’s  wars, deserve better, and the older ones perhaps have the greater claim on us.
 
We are prepared to let in every Tom Dick and Harry from around the world (including the legendary one-legged roof-tiler).  We have EU  citizens, economic migrants, illegals to whom we turn a blind eye, and “asylum seekers”, some with rather limited credibility.  We have  organised criminals and gangs and people-traffickers.  We let them all  come, in their hundreds of thousands.  Yet we fail to offer a place to  those small numbers of Gurkhas who have given their best years, and risked their lives, for us and for our country.  It will not do.
 
Both the Conservative Party, and The Freedom Association (which I have  the privilege to Chair), have criticised our government’s failure, in  a host of ways, to honour the Military Covenant (I published a prominent article on this in the March issue of Compass magazine). The Gurkha issue is a small part of the duty we owe to our soldiers,  but it is a key test of our commitment. We cannot ask them to fight for us, and then throw them out at the end of their careers. Those who have eaten the White Queen’s meat deserve better of us.

The leader of Scotland’s Catholics, Cardinal Keith O’Brien, is shocked at the government’s proposals for stem-cell research.  I am shocked that a representative of a religious group — even one so ancient and prestigious as the Catholic Church — should presume to tell Catholic MPs how they should vote.  Parliamentarians are elected to serve the best interests of their constituents, not to take instruction from external organisations, however august.  (This stricture does not, of course apply to taking advice from their party, since almost all MPs are elected on a Party Manifesto, which gives the party’s position a democratic legitimacy).
 
Of course we expect MPs to exercise their judgement in the light of their values, their convictions, and their conscience (assuming they have one).  Indeed we hope to elect honourable men and women with high standards.  But that is twice removed from accepting instructions from their religious or other group.  Do we expect doctor MPs to accept instructions from the BMA, or lawyer MPs to get their marching orders from the Law Society?  First of all, the parliamentarian’s duty, in the course of his work, is to those who elected him.  It is wrong in principle, and anti-democratic, for him to give a higher priority to any other interest.  (This is why I have a problem with trade-union-sponsored MPs).  But secondly, an MP should not always seek to impose his personal morality on the general public through legislation.
 
Let’s take another example, also from the area of human reproduction.  Abortion law is a vexed question.  Indeed it features in the same legislation as the stem-cell question.  I am perfectly content that a Catholic MP should regard abortion as morally wrong, and I respect that view.  But I should have even greater respect for an MP who said “I believe that abortion is a sin, and I would never condone it for myself or for those close to me.  But this is a personal conviction, and it is not my place as a legislator to impose my personal morality, through legislation, on others who may not share it.  This is a moral choice but also a personal choice.  Therefore while I would always argue against abortion, and counsel against it, I would not legislate against it”.
 
To take a more light-hearted example, I have no problem with an MP being a vegetarian, but I would have a big problem with any MP who sought to impose vegetarianism, by law, on the rest of us.  So I would ask Cardinal O’Brien to back off, and to stop issuing instructions to MPs.  If he wishes to instruct MPs to adopt Catholic morality, than he should field candidates at a General Election on a Catholic Morality Manifesto.
 
After that diatribe, no doubt someone will ask where I stand in the stem-cell issue, so I had better come clean.  If we were to believe the more sensational tabloid press, if the plan were actually to create human/animals hybrids, if the proposals were for exhibits in zoos with human/chimpanzee crosses (which I believe may become technically feasible), then we should all have profound moral and practical concerns.  I would absolutely oppose any such proposal.  But there is no such proposal.  All we are doing is manipulating DNA molecules.  A DNA molecule is merely stored data.  I see no more moral problem with manipulating a strand of DNA than in manipulating data in a computer.
 
Of course the Catholic position is that a fertilised human egg-cell is morally a human being, and entitled to the full panoply of human rights.  I find that idea difficult to accept.  An egg is not a chicken.  An acorn is not an oak-tree.  Every year millions of fertilised, potentially viable human ova are aborted spontaneously and flushed down the loo, without the putative mothers even knowing about them.  We do not build memorials to these millions of lost lives  We do not have funeral services for them.  We do not regard their passing as a moral stain on humanity.  And a strand of DNA is a great deal less than a two-day embryo.
 
So let’s allow our MPs to exercise their judgement in the interests of their constituents.  But let us remind them that they do not always have to impose their personal views on others.  In a free society, moral choices should be left, as far as possible, to the citizen.

I thought I was more or less unshockable, but I admit I was a bit taken aback by an e-mail I received last week from one Yannick Laude, who proves to be a parliamentary official in the Press Office of the Liberal Group (ALDE).  Forgive me, Gentle Reader, but if you are to understand the story, I have to repeat the obscene and offensive language in which he chose to express himself (sensitive folk can look away now): “We don’t need stupid f***ing xenophob (sic) tory anti-european as you”.  Sic(k) in every sense.
 
Language like this would be unacceptable from anyone on the parliament’s e-mail system.  From a parliamentary fonctionnaire to an elected Member, it is intolerable.  I have raised the issue with the General Secretary of the parliament, Harald Romer, and with the College of Quaestors (the MEPs’ shop stewards).
 
This all arose because earlier a member had e-mailed everyone, MEPs, staff and assistants, about signing a Written Declaration.  A number of members then responded “Reply All” saying “Yes, I’ll sign”.  This is an abuse of the system, creating tens of thousands of unnecessary e-mails clogging up the parliament’s already creaking computers, so I spammed back (I admit it!) saying “Stop spamming: we don’t all need to know”.  It was this that elicited the extraordinary response from Laude.  (As Shakespeare might have put it, “Alas, poor Yannick”!).
 
It is sad that there are still a few intellectually-challenged europhiles out there who try to tag sceptics with the labels of “xenophobe” and “Little Englander”, so it is worth making the case, one more time, why on the whole, the sceptics tend to be the internationalists.
 
In my own case, I spent over thirty years working mainly for multi-national companies in Europe, America and especially in Asia.  I spent over a decade living in Asia — Hong Kong, Malaysia, Thailand, Singapore, Korea.  I spent three years running a business in Malaysia (rather successfully, as it happens) employing 280 local people, where I was the only European.  Did I run into cross-cultural problems?  Yes I did.  Between my Malay and my Chinese staff!
 
Since entering politics in 1999 I have worked in many EU member-states, from Estonia and Finland in the North to Malta in the South, from Spain in the West to Greece and Bulgaria in the East.  I have worked in America (where I was awarded an “International Legislator of the Year” citation by the American Legislative Exchange Council), and served on the parliament’s delegations to ASEAN and Korea.  I am passionately committed to free trade and internationalism, and I see Britain as a great global trading nation, not an off-shore province in a country called Europe.
 
It is the europhiles who are inward-looking, self-referential, protectionist.  While Commission President Barroso has made some helpful anti-protectionist remarks, nevertheless protectionism is built into the system and institutionalised in the CAP.  I would not say that europhiles are xenophobic, but many of them are consumed with resentment at the perceived global hegemony of the USA, and are terrified of globalisation and the “threat” from China and India.
 
Most eurosceptics I know are committed to internationalism, free trade, a global vision and global interests.  As the Norwegian NO Campaign slogan put it, “Europe is too small for us”.  It is the Little Europeans — like Mr. Laude — that I worry about.

UPDATE:- Since writing this, I have received by e-mail a fulsome apology from Mr. Laude.  Unlike his original e-mail, this one is in perfectly good English, so I guess it was drafted for him and that he was required to send it.

This must be one of the wittiest and most amusing referendum protests to date.  See the signs that they took to Brussels in December: click here and here.  And visit:  www.iwantareferendum.com

Hugh Muir in the Guardian, Jan 9th:  “A question from Robert Kilroy-Silk, MEP for the East Midlands. “Does the commission attribute the death of culture in France to its absorption into the EU?” he asks, borrowing his thesis from Time magazine. “Is this why it has no artist or writer of international standing?” And if we file this alongside his earlier inquiry, when he asked whether Marks & Spencer’s mirrors were distorted to make women look thinner, a pattern emerges. Might we attribute the death of his TV career to his brain-dead observations?”

The latest edition of Freedom Today is a cracking issue, packed with news and comment on EU questions and a whole range of other issues, with contributions from John Redwood, Brian Binley, Tim Condon and others.  To get your copy (and to join the Freedom Association) visit www.tfa.net.

The Sunday Telegraph carried a story about the extension of the EU’s Schengen free-movement area (travel without passports) to the new Eastern European accession states, with direct borders with countries like Ukraine.  While Britain is not part of Schengen, this means that immigrants from the Former Soviet Union will be able to travel without hindrance from Slovenia to Calais.  They will have little trouble entering across the EU’s porous Eastern borders, and only a little more smuggling themselves into Britain.  The Telegraph story carried a brief quote from me, expressing my concern.
 
My good friend and colleague Joel Anand Samy of the Adriatic Institute in Zagreb shares my worries.  He writes:  “The Balkan mafia groups are gearing up for record Christmas bonuses. You can be assured that the EU’s imprudent approach will increase human trafficking. The shipment of arms and illegal hard drugs will pour into Western Europe as never before. Unfortunately, we have just strengthened Croatia’s organized criminal groups”.http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml;jsessionid=0VFLGEEJA4BGRQFIQMGSFFWAVCBQWIV0?xml=/news/2007/12/16/wborder116.xml

The EU’s six-month rotating Presidency goes to Slovenia for Jan/Jun 2008 — the first of the new accession states to hold it.  Their diplomatic resources are so limited that they may well be just a front for France, who have the next turn (July/Dec).  But you might like a quote from the (not very diplomatic) Slovenian European Minister Janez Lenarcic: “Slovenia will delay sensitive EU policy debates if necessary.  It wouldn’t be helpful for ratification in the UK if at the same time we discussed the fate of the British [budget] rebate”.  So we know what to expect.