RUTHFULLY YOURS

So now it’s cards on the table, the big lie exposed, all pretence over. After decades during which the peoples of Europe were told that the EU posed no threat to the sovereignty of member states, the European Council President Herman von Rompuy has finally stated that the real purpose of the EU is nothing less than to destroy the nation state. The Mail reports:

The age of the nation state is over and the idea that countries can stand alone is an ‘illusion’ and a ‘lie’, the EU president believes. In one of the most open proclamations of the goal of a European superstate since the heyday of Jacques Delors, Herman Van Rompuy went on to denounce Eurosceptism as the greatest threat to peace.

… Mr Van Rompuy’s speech in the German capital told his audience that ‘the time of the homogenous nation state is over’. He added that the ‘danger’ of Euroscepticism was spreading beyond the confines of countries such as Britain and was becoming a stronger force across the whole continent. ‘We have together to fight the danger of a new Euroscepticism,’ he declared. ‘This is no longer the monopoly of a few countries.

So the greatest danger to the EU is… democracy, and those who support the right of a country to govern itself. Nations lead to nationalism; nationalism leads to war; abolish the nation and you abolish war. This is a clear exposition of the doctrine of ‘transnational progressivism’ that has become the orthodoxy in western ‘progressive’ circles. It is, of course, as absurd as it is sinister. As Standpoint editor Daniel Johnson puts it, also in the Mail:

This ­blustering Belgian, the grandest ­panjandrum in Brussels, is straight out of Gilbert and Sullivan.  ‘President’ Van Rompuy and his British colleague, the EU ‘High Representative’ Baroness Ashton, cut richly comic figures on the international stage.

It is tempting to dismiss their empire-building as an extravagant but otherwise harmless pastime. The trouble is that these Eurocrats not only waste tens of billions of pounds on their palatial offices and legions of flunkeys — they have real power, too.

The British public watched in dismay as, earlier this month, David Cameron was forced to back down from his promise to stop Brussels from increasing its already bloated budget…Worse, Mr Cameron agreed to further treaty changes to ­placate the German Chancellor Angela Merkel, without securing any firm promise that there will be no new EU power grab.

Mr Van Rompuy’s Berlin speech appears to be the first shot in a new campaign to speed the transfer of sovereignty to Brussels — a transfer that was briefly interrupted by the defeat of the European Constitution and the Lisbon Treaty in ­successive referendums.

Over to you, Prime Minister Cameron. Time to take your head out of the euro-quicksand.