The Honorable Lord Malcolm Pearson                                                                    Member                                                                                                             House of Lords

Well, ladies and gentleman, I trust we can take it as read that it is an enormous honor for a maverick backbench peer such as myself to address a gathering of such distinction here in Washington - even if I do come with a recommendation from the Lady. But is also quite a serious responsibility, because very few people on this side of the Atlantic have yet paid much attention to the project of European Union.

This is no criticism, because the British people are only now waking up the true nature of the corrupt octopus in Brussels, despite the best efforts of our political leaders in the BBC to keep it from them.

So, why should you bother? Ladies and gentlemen, I fear you should start bothering, because the project is very bad news for you, too – albeit, a little further down the track. I should start by emphasizing that I speak to you as a good European, with clients and business friends in every European country and family in quite a few of them. We British, you respect, kept its for love for the real Europe – the Europe of separate democracies, each with its glorious culture and history. What we fear and dislike intensely is the project of European Union, which is a very different thing. It’s when you put the inverted commas, or quotes, ‘round the word Europe that the trouble starts. To justify what I’m saying I fear we have to look at the basic history and the raison d’etre of the EU. How far the project has already got and where it will certainly go if we don’t wake up and stop it.

The fundamental idea behind the EU project was born after the First World War, but only came to fruition after the second. This fundamental idea was, and believe it or not still is, that nation-states were responsible for the carnage of both wars. Those nation-states must therefore be emasculated and diluted into a new form of super-national government - run, not by elected national politicians reflecting the desires of the peoples, but by a commission of wise technocrats.

This leads me to the key piece of Europhile propaganda: the claim that the EU has kept the peace in Europe since 1945 and that it is essential to maintain it in future. This is the big deception, which plays at the almost unconscious level. It is a warm, mystic conviction that the EU, with all its faults, must be inevitably good because it brings peace.

Those who promote this myth do not tolerate any rational examination of history or the facts. Indeed, they accuse those of us who query the divinity of the EU project of being rabid nationalists, xenophobes, little Englanders, and worse. You start to be guilty of all this as soon as you dare to point out that, of course NATO was responsible for keeping the peace in Europe until the wall came down in 1989, or if you ask which European country would have gone to war with another in the absence of the EU. So this is essential plank of the Europhile position is simply wishful thinking constantly repeated by the Eurocrats in order to justify the project which pays them so well.

Indeed, if you stand back and scratch your head a bit and take a calm look at the EU, you’ll see it is a well-tried model for discord, not peace. It contains three of the most important ingredients for conflict. First, it is a top-down amalgamation of different peoples put together without their informed consent, and such arrangements usually end in conflict. You only have to look at Northern Ireland, Yugoslavia, the trans-caucuses, Kashmir and most of Africa to see that. Second, the EU is riddled in corruption from top to bottom. No less than five senior whistle-blowers have been silenced and sidelined in the last five years and its own internal auditors have refused to sign its accounts for the last ten years. Third, the EU is institutionally undemocratic, as I shall show. But before the subject of peace I should mention that a large majority of Eurocrats and Europhiles see the EU’s main purpose in life as being to stand up to and to undermine the United States of America. In fact, this was always part of the project, inspired by France’s deep, psychotic need to bite the hand that freed her in two world wars. (clapping) Here, at least, ladies and gentlemen, is one cousin from the other side of the pond who would like to pay tribute to you, the United States of America for all you’ve done to our continent and for our peace, because you did it – they didn’t.

Luckily, there is little prospect that the EU will be able to come up with the defense budget necessary to fulfill its military ambitions. But this will continue to poison the trans-Atlantic relationship for the foreseeable future.

History has one other important lesson for us here, which is that, on the whole, democracies do not provoke war, and indeed it’s hard to think of a genuine democracy which has declared war on another. So, we Euro-skeptics believe that a free trade association between the democracies of Europe, linked through NATO, is much less likely to end in tears than is the emerging, undemocratic mega state.

Ladies and gentlemen, I hope it’s helpful if I explain a little of how the EU functions and show why it is that it’s so innately undemocratic. In other words, what sort of animal are you dealing with? How bad is it now?

Even in Britain, very few people realize what huge areas of our national life have already been handed over to control by Brussels. Put simply, these include: everything to do with a single market -in other words, all of our industry and commerce - all of our social and labor policy, our environment, agriculture, fish, and foreign aid.

What do I mean by control from Brussels? Well, in all those areas of our national life which used to be entirely controlled by Parliament, our government or executive can be outvoted in the council of ministers of member states where it has 9 percent of the votes, and you need 30 percent to block a new law. That is a system known as Qualified Majority Voting, or QMV.  If our government agrees, or is outvoted in any new law in those areas, then Parliament, being the House of Commons and the Lords, must put it into British law. If they don’t, the country faces unlimited fines in the so-called Court of Justice in Luxembourg.

So our Parliament and the Parliaments of all the other member states have already become rubber stamps in all those areas of our national life. Our foreign trade relations are in an even worse category – the commission of the EU bureaucracy, it self-negotiates those on our behalf. And so in this area, the EU already has its own legal personality to which I shall return when I mention the proposed new constitution from Europe, but right now I’m talking about the EU as it is and as it will remain if the constitution is rejected by the French on May the twenty-ninth.

So to go back to where we are now, in addition, laws affecting our justice and home affairs and our foreign and defense policies must also be rubber-stamped by Parliament if they haven’t been agreed by our government and all the other member states’ governments in Brussels. In other words, our government can still veto new laws in Brussels in these areas, but if they don’t we have to enact them.

If Parliament were to reject a new law in these areas, we would not be subject to unlimited fines in the Luxembourg court, but we would be in breach of our treaty obligations, which is, of course, a rather more horrifying prospect for our foreign office and political classes in their diplomatic cocktail parties and so on. A fine, after all, is paid by the taxpayer.

Um, ladies and gentlemen there is no appeal against the Luxembourg court, which is not really a court of law but rather the engine of the treaties, and most of its judges wouldn’t make the bench in Britain; all you need is a law degree.

It is the highest court in the EU - superior to all our national courts - in the area which ceded Brussels and it must find in favor of the ever-closer union of the peoples of Europe, ordained the treaties and it’s guilty of much judicial activism in order to do so.
Our government actually admits now, that more of half of all our major laws and 80 percent of all law originate in Brussels under this system. No law passed in Brussels has ever been successfully overturned by Parliament.

Ladies and gentlemen, there are four other features of this Brussels system which are worth emphasizing, all of them innately undemocratic. First, the unelected bureaucracy - the commission – has the monopoly to propose all new laws. This reflects the basic idea behind the EU Project which I’d mentioned. The nation-states, the democracies of Europe, must be emasculated and diluted into this new super national government run by the commission of wise technocrats. Second, the commission’s legal proposals are then negotiated in secret by the shadowy committee of permanent representatives, or bureaucrats, from the national capital states known as co-repa.

Decisions are taken in the Council of Ministers, again by secret vote. National parliaments are precluded from knowing how their bureaucrats and ministers negotiate and vote. The commission then executes all EU law, supported when necessary by the so-called court. The Eurocrats pretend that democracy’s maintained because decisions are taken in the Council of Ministers by national ministers who were elected as national MPs.  But the point remains that Parliament itself is excluded from the process. We can and do debate some EU legislation, but we have to pass it exactly as agreed in Brussels.

A third features of this frightening new system enshrined in the treaties is that once an area of national life has been ceded to control from Brussels it can never be returned to national parliaments. This is known in Euro-speak as the Acquis Communitaire or ‘powers acquired by the community.’ In plain English, this translates as the ratchet which can only grind in one direction towards the ever-closer union of the peoples of Europe.

The fourth feature I would mention is that no changes can be made to the treaties unless they are agreed unanimously by the Council of Ministers. So the return of powers to national parliament by renegotiation is no realistic. The only way out is the doorway.
It’s not really your problem, but the UK’s membership with the EU is also very expensive financially. The government steadfastly refuses to carry out a cost-benefit analysis because it doesn’t want the result to be made public. So we have commissioned some private studies, which produce a cautious estimate at the cost to the taxpayer and the economy of around forty billion per annum, or 4 percent of GDP. Two new studies are on the way which will take this estimate considerably higher.

It’s also worth saying that the whole of continental Europe will continue in steady and irreversible demographic and therefore economic decline over the next fifty years. The UK and Ireland will improve their demography somewhat, um, as of course will Turkey - and how. The USA looks fairly healthy. Japan looks terrible. China and the Far East are set to boom. Add to this the unemployment and decay caused by the Franco-German social and labor model and you have to ask why the British political establishment wants to stay on the Titanic.

Before leaving economics, I suppose I should say a brief word about the Euro – the single currency. The main point to grasp about the Euro is that it is not an economic project at all. It was always a political project, designed to hold the emerging mega state together. It also has serious design faults; the Eurozone has no common language, it’s mobility of labor is low, and its single interest rate cannot suit twelve different and diverging economies for long. In fact, the stresses are already emerging.

Also, a currency zone has to have the ability to move taxes from rich to poor regions within the zone - e.g. south to the north in the United Kingdom, north to the south in Italy, west to east in Germany, the federal budget in, in the United States. But there is no federal budget to speak of in the EU, and of course the plan has always been to set one up in response which will therefore occur in the Eurozone.

I don’t really understand the currency markets, ladies and gentlemen, but with all these problems I cannot see how the Euro can remain strong for long, especially if the French vote no on the twenty-ninth of May to the proposed new constitution, which will create the fear that the whole project may start to unravel.

Which brings me to the constitution itself. I don’t want to say too much about its content, if only because it does look as though the French may be going to reject it, because they think it’s too Thatcherite, and because they are fed up with our government. In fact, in other words they would reject it completely for the wrong reasons – the opposite reasons to why they should reject it, but that’s France for you. (laughter, clapping)
In fact, it isn’t Thatcherite at all; it spells out the final extinction of British sovereignty and the sovereignty of the democracies of Europe. Its worst feature is that it grants the EU its own legal personality for the first time – superior to that of all the member states. There is no longer even the pretense that the EU is an arrangement between sovereign nations. The EU, the Brussels system, becomes sovereign. The EU flag, which at the moment is flown as mere advertising, becomes real. The EU anthem, Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, become the anthem of a mega state. Alas, poor Beethoven.

I brought a one-page summary of the constitution with me. Which show its other main features in case anyone is interested. But briefly, the EU takes over most of the rest of the powers which we have retained so far, including defense, and I brought a one-page paper on defense in case anyone wants to see the vital wording on that.

Public opinion in the United Kingdom is running strongly against the constitution, and I think it is safe to assume that we will vote against it if we ever have a referendum on it. But if the French, on the twenty-ninth of May, or the Dutch, in the twenty-first of June vote against it, that probably kills it. Personally, I would rather regret that, because we British would not then get the chance to reject it. -So to differentiate ourselves from the rest of EU and start the process of withdrawal.

So I actually want the French to vote yes, but I’m afraid, as usual, they can’t be relied on. (laughter) Uh, a wiser council might be to rejoice if they vote no because there will be confusion. If they reject it, it is possible that after a period of – and this is my scenario, this is the negative scenario – if they reject it, it’s quite possible the after a period of settling down the Eurocrats will set up another intergovernmental conference and produce another treaty, subtly achieving the same aims as the constitution, leaving clever little doors open in the wording through which the court will later walk. But the more likely scenario is that we shall be left for some time with the treaty as it now is - the treaty of Nice which, some features I have described to you.

Uh, we must not think that the problem has gone away, however, just because the French reject Nice. The present situation is not in your interests at all. I trust the danger to the Atlantic Alliance and their special relationship is obvious, but your business leaders should start to see that if the European Union survives there investments in Europe will turn out to be very much less successful then they hope. Your supreme court, too, is starting to take note of European court judgments, and I submit that that is not agreeable to your democracy. (clapping)

I have actually spent the last week in Washington with all this in mind, lining up a conference which we propose to hold at Heritage at the end of June, which would look at all these issues from your perspective. The British Euro-skeptic A-Team will be in town, I hope for a few days. We hope also to involve the Federalist Society, the Hudson Institute, Discovery, American Foreign Policy Council, the Institute of World Politics, and maybe others.

The idea is of course to start to sensitize and convince the administration and the policy community that this thing in Brussels is not at all in your national interest. We hope the conference will be the first step towards convincing you that: As it enters a period of confusion, perhaps very soon, with the French referendum but certainly with the British referendum next year, you should do what you can to help it disintegrate. You certainly should not do anything to help it survive.

Ladies and gentlemen, in this gathering I feel I must also at least touch on the moral dimension of the EU project. I need hardly say that it is fundamentally secular, irreligious, even atheistic. The convention which was drawing up the constitution refused the supplication of the pope himself, that the constitution should contain at least some reference to our Judeo-Christian heritage.

A thoroughly decent Italian, Senor Bottigleone, was refused a place on the commission because he confessed that he thought homosexuality was a sin.  Our conference at the end of June will look at this most important and worrying aspect of the EU Project as well, and bring it fully into the open so that you and your fellow Americans can appreciate this most depressing aspect of this new secular empire in Brussels.

Ladies and gentlemen, I conclude. We Euroskeptics love the real Europe, but we see the project of European union as a bad idea. It’s a bad idea like slavery, communism, high-rise flats. I don’t tell – need to tell - an audience of this eminence the damage which ideas can do when they become generally accepted and turn out to be wrong. I don’t know if you’ve heard the story of the young, white Russian officer who wrote home to his fiancé in 1918 from the front against the Bolsheviks. “Oh, my darling,” he said. “Please do not worry. In a few week s I shall be home with you in Moscow and we shall be married. These people are not very well armed and their ideas are even worse.”
Well, three days later he was killed, so he wasn’t entirely right about their arms, but he did turn out to be right about the ideas which inspired Soviet Communism. It’s just that it took seventy years and fifty million lives to prove him so.

Let’s hope the EU doesn’t end up as quite such a dangerous idea as that. With any luck, it will start to decay from within. If we have the energy to understand it, to expose it, and to fight it. Ladies and gentlemen I trust we can do that together. Thank you. (clapping)

We have a  few minutes for questions if you would like to ask a question or two. Can we have the microphone? This is the microphone.

Sir, I can’t see - the gentleman over there, standing up. Yeah. I couldn’t see, sorry.

Lord Pearson,  in your discussion you talked about how the European Commission, or Parliament, whatever it’s called, often times passes statues and things that have impact  on the member states. Can you share with us an example of a statue that might have been passed in Brussels which the British Parliament was obliged to enact for the laws of England even though it might – the members there might disagree with such a European statue?

Yes, I mean a recent example of that – um, which was produced of course under all our new anti-terrorism laws – um, is the European arrest warrant, which certainly wouldn’t have gone through the House of Lords or the Commons. But it was agreed, um, in Brussels – actually, with our home secretary not even saying a word in the council when it was passed, um, because it had all been stitched up in co-repa. And what that arrest warrant does is it allows a magistrate in any EU country to extradite a British citizen from the United Kingdom to stand trial in that magistrate’s country without habeas corpus or jury therefore for crimes which is accused of committing in that magistrate’s country which may not even be a crime in the United Kingdom.
Ah, for instance, xenophobia is one of the crimes covered by the arrest warrant. We don’t really have a definition for xenophobia; we certainly don’t have a law for it, but I expect I’m committing it now.  (laughter)

And, um, that would be one example. There was no way that was going to go through the Lords and yet we had to accept it. We had to rubberstamp it. After many hours of debate – if not we’d have been exposed to unlimited fines in the Luxembourg court. So.

Lord Pearson, you mentioned the judicial activism of the Luxembourg court. You’ve got some examples of that?

Yeah, I mean, one of the best - the judicial – eh, yeah, the court. But one of the best ones of those was when our poor little Prime Minister, John Major, signed the Maastricht Treaty in 1992. He got a derogation – an exclusion – for the United Kingdom from the EU’s social policy, the social chapter, and he came back saying he’d won game, set, and match and how wonderful it was we didn’t have to follow the social chapter which includes the working time directive for the forty-eight hour week. So the Eurocrats and the court thought, Well, we’ve given them an exclusion from the social chapter under the single market legislation but – and they’ve got it – but we’ll bring it in under health and safety at work.

So they set the forty-eight hour week, the limit of forty-eight hours on the working week , is a health and safety at work matter, it’s not a social matter, and therefore you haven’t got an exclusion; it’s subject to the qualified majority vote and you’re getting it.
We of course objected and went to the court, and the court said, Of course the forty-eight hour week is health and safety at work matter; it’s not a social matter. And so, um, we were lumbered with it and we’ve got it now. It’s haunting our national health service now something considerably. So.

One more question.

Different aspect of the European Union: is what many commentators refer to as a growing Islamazation of Europe, and many people have looked to the entry of Turkey into the European Union – the common market – as being –
European Union, Sir, not Common Market
- European Union – entering into it as being a further growth in Islamazation. Could you talk about that?
Yes. I mean I think this is a subject I think we’ll be looking at. My colleague Caroline Cox, Baroness Cox is very strong on this subject. Um, certainly already the EU’s social policy, it’s politically correct charge of fundamental rights and all that is already giving the space and leaving the vacuum for the Islamists and the violent Islamic people to enter. And that of course – that’s already there, I mean look at the problems in Holland and we’ve got them in the United Kingdom, too. Um, and, um, the Prime Minister’s -  we’ve just turned down some legislation in the Lords where he wanted to make incitement to religious hatred into a criminal offense. That was in put in entirely as a sop to the Muslim community. Um, because if we’re rude about Muslims you’re immediately inciting religious hatred. If you query any of the great Christian tenants, I mean, that’s all right, you know? And, um, of course if Turkey were to enter  (but that would take ten years) if Turkey were to enter it would of course be a Trojan horse of some size for the Islamazation of the continent – no doubt about that. Whether – quite what the position will be with the Islamist advance in Turkey in ten years’ time is anybody’s guest, and so it’s an open question I think, but a very worrying one, very worrying. (clapping)
Thank you. Thanks very much. Thank you.