Dear Mr
Patten,
You are quite right to say that we cannot go on "like this" in
relation to
the EU. But you are wrong in claiming that our being in
the EU and
"endlessly, truculently making trouble" is what "poisons
political debate".
When you tell us to stop whingeing and toe the
line, you are asking us to
skin and film the ulcerous place, while allowing
the real poison to go on
spreading through the body politic.
This
poison entered our political system when the British electorate were
induced
to stay in the Common Market by deliberate misrepresentation of the
facts on
the part of successive governments.
We did not give our permission for
the simple trading organization we joined
to turn itself into a political
Union, laying down the law and claiming us
en masse for its
"citizens". So why should you imply that we should shut up
and pretend
that we did?
Please don't say that we foresaw all this in 1975, when we
were last allowed
a referendum. We had no idea of what was
planned - for the simple reason
that our politicians did
everything they could to pull the wool over our
eyes.
We were told,
quite specifically, that there would be no essential loss of
sovereignty. Thousands of us were naïve enough to believe what we were
told, and voted not for a "European Union" with its own legal personality
and constitution, but for a Common Market - something which
later proved
not to have been on offer. If we hadn't been deliberately
misled, there
would have been no 'yes'.
As Tom Benyon put it, in a
letter to the Times on 29 May, 2003: 'In 1975 I
campaigned as a Conservative
parliamentary candidate for a "yes" vote in the
referendum that kept us in
the EC. In retrospect it is abundantly clear
that I campaigned on a
prospectus that was sufficiently false to ensure
that, if the issue had been
a public offer in securities, I would face
prosecution under the provisions
of the Companies Act and I would lose.'
Please don't say that we should
have taken the trouble to check the facts
out for ourselves. In
matters like this, people who work long hours to earn
their living, or look
after their families, without benefit of travel
allowances and expense
accounts, rely on their paid "representatives" to
give them the facts
on which to base their decisions. If we didn't know
what we were
voting for, it was because our politicians didn't want us to.
To adapt
your own recent words of censure to the Greek Cypriots: what has
been caused
is a huge amount of political ill-will, because there is a deep
sense that
some British leaders have acted in bad faith, and that doesn't
make it easy
for the British people to throw their hats in the air and cheer
at their
accession to the European Union.
If you really don't want us to go on
"like this", you should drop all your
silly accusations of truculence
and trouble-making, stop trying to bully us
into submission, and humbly
admit that we have been taken this far along the
road to integration without
popular awareness or consent. The duplicity of
our politicians, and
not some ingrained national perversity, is the source
of the problem; and,
to avoid future "truculence", any further integration
must be endorsed by
the people of this country in full awareness of its
implications for our
right to govern ourselves.
Incidentally, nobody in their right mind would
say yes to a "constitution"
300-odd pages long, written and cross-referenced
in a manner beyond the
comprehension of the average MP - let
alone the average member of the
public, who would need to take a few months
off work and sign up for lessons
in Euro-speak to get to the bottom of
it. The Americans have managed for
over two hundred years with an
easy-to-understand constitution around 20
pages long. Only something
of similar length, written in plain English and
without complicated
cross-references, should be offered for our approval.
Yours
sincerely,
Gillian Swanson,
Whitley
Bay,
England.