How long before the grey dictators march on London?
This is Peter Hitchens' Mail on Sunday column
Civlian juntas have seized power in Rome and Athens. Soon, similar gangs of grey men may be sweeping aside national governments in Madrid and Lisbon. Nobody much is protesting. In time – don’t rule it out – it could be our turn here, with Lords Patten and Mandelson forming a cabinet of none of the talents.
Our ruling Left-wing elite seem oddly untroubled by the ruthless snuffing-out of national sovereignty across southern Europe. If the same thing had been done by a bunch of colonels, they would have been piously outraged.
But of course these putsches are the work of the European Union, a project the Left have long supported. And the EU is more subtle than any colonels. There is no need for midnight arrests or tanks on the streets. The enormous invisible power of the EU’s law and institutions gets its way without any need for such things.
The sheer dictatorial nerve of Italy’s new viceroy, Mario Monti, pictured right, is impressive. He has formed a government without a single elected politician in it.
You may well say that Italy’s politicians are, like ours, a sorry collection of blowhards and amateurs. But that does not mean they should be replaced by something worse – robots under the command of the EU Commission.
Once again, please pay close attention. This is the best warning you will ever get of what the EU is really about. It is an empire, in which the great nations of Europe, including ours, are intended to disappear for ever.
It has from the start been based on a grave mistake – the idea that national differences and independence no longer matter and are obsolete. It is this mistake which led it into creating the mad single currency that is now ruining it. But people who are driven by ideals can seldom see when they are wrong.
You and I may grasp that the euro has failed, as we always knew it would. But in the high councils of Euroland, they are unable to recognise this blazingly obvious reality.
Inside their tiny, deluded world it is all the other way round. The euro is a sparkling success that must be kept alive at all costs. So is the European Union. We must march onward towards ever-closer union, even if it is so close that it suffocates us to death.
In the minds of Chancellor Merkel and President Sarkozy, those to blame for the present problems are the countries that have inexplicably gone bankrupt, or the ones who are about to do so.
Their peoples must undergo collective punishment for their failure, and be driven mad by useless austerity programmes that devastate their countries while failing to dent their debt.
They must submit to direct rule from Brussels, no longer allowed even to pretend that they are independent.
It will be painful to see how much treasure will now be squandered on trying to fend off reality.
But, as Britain learned during John Major’s Exchange Rate Mechanism crisis, you cannot keep out the ocean with a garden fence.
When all this is over – and let it be soon – it seems increasingly likely that several countries will have been forced out of the euro.
This country may have been strong-armed into imposing a ruinous EU-mandated tax.
Heaven knows what Germany will have to swallow. The sad thing is that, even after the turmoil, the waste and the pain, the major British political parties will continue to insist that this country should stay in the EU.
Why do they do this? There has never been any good reason for us to belong. There are now hundreds of reasons why we should leave.
When will we get a leadership with the courage to say so, and act accordingly?
The Cenotaph lout proves jail sentences are a fraud
Charlie Gilmour, in a drugged and drunken rage of self-righteousness, desecrated our most revered memorial to the fallen.
A judge ‘sentenced’ him to 16 months in prison. A number of silly female commentators, fooled by Gilmour’s carefully styled courtroom appearance in which he dressed as HarryPotter, whimpered soppily about the savagery of the Bench.
Gilmour’s mother Polly Samson and rich, rock-star adoptive father David Gilmour mounted a costly appeal and let it be known they thought it was all terribly unfair and out of proportion. Given the rock industry’s long-term role in promoting drugs, and the fact the younger Gilmour’s brain was ablaze with LSD at the time of his crime, it seems to me they would have been wiser to stay silent.
Now, after serving a paltry four months of his sentence, the Cenotaph Swinger emerges from jail with a hard-man haircut (this will be by choice – it is many years since prisoners were compulsorily cropped), a sulky face and a roll-up fag behind his ear, very different from the meek, lost boy we were shown at the trial.
And to those who say that prison doesn’t teach anybody anything, I would only reply that Charlie Gilmour now knows precisely what the Cenotaph looks like, and exactly where it is – and so do lots of other people who will think twice before using it as an adventure playground in future.
What we have also learned, alas, is that prison sentences are even more fraudulent than they were. Criminals used to serve half of the term stated. Now it seems to be only a quarter.
A 'spy chief' with no intelligence
I am not sure what use Eliza Manningham-Buller ever was. MI5, which she somehow came to lead, is a bloated and expensive collection of plods which feeds on our fears and could probably be abolished tomorrow without any of us being less safe.
I always laughed when she was called a ‘spy chief’, as if MI5 was the same as the marginally more glamorous MI6, which does actually employ some spies. One thing she knows nothing about is drugs. She thinks there is a ‘war on drugs’ and that it has ‘failed’. So the obvious solution is to ‘decriminalise’ dope.
The same hogwash has gushed from the mouths of various other airhead celebrities and ex-Ministers.
As I have repeatedly recorded here, cannabis use in this country is effectively decriminalised already, with most offences being dealt with by an unrecorded warning. Nor is this new. In February 1994, John O’Connor, former head of the Scotland Yard Flying Squad, said: ‘Cannabis is a decriminalised drug.’
It is because we have given up the fight against it that the correlation between cannabis use and mental illness is now worrying our psychiatrists so much.
A security service whose ex-chief doesn’t even know these basic facts can’t be much good, can it?
Our security is going for a song
I am still amazed that this Government gets good marks for competence on defence. The US Navy and US Marines are to buy the 74 Harrier jets which were so stupidly scrapped by the supposed Conservative Liam Fox.
They cannot believe their luck. ‘We’re taking advantage of all the money the Brits have spent on them,’ says American Admiral Mark Heinrich. ‘It’s like buying a car with maybe 15,000 miles on it.’
It’s plain who is the loser in this deal.
Tories are a joke to Dave
I do wonder what David Cameron says in private about Patrick Mercer, who was so rude about the Premier the other day.
Actually, I don’t wonder at all. Mr Cameron must spend long minutes every evening laughing at all the traditional Tories who continue so foolishly to vote for him.