Who Makes Our Laws

Punctuation to this title is available if you can make a good enough case for your preference.

Shrieking, and picking up of skirts, at the recognition of a new Europarty made up of the BNP and such like. The Europarties are not identical to the Groups in the European Parliament, but the crossover is considerable, the Europarties have the sole right to campaign in European Elections (we have yet to see the full consequences of that), and they are maintained at public expense, as are their attendant think tanks, the Eurofoundations. Your money and mine will now be funding a party and a think tank for Nick Griffin and his brethren.

It beats me why there is any fuss over this. These and other deeply unsavoury people have been legislating for us ever since we went into the wretched thing, both in the European Parliament or in the predecessor European Assembly, and in the coalitions represented in the Council of Ministers.

Those coalitions might nominally be single parties: off to Brussels in the Thatcher and, to a lesser extent, Major years trooped Ministers who were members of the Western Goals Institute or the Monday Club, with their crossover, via things like the League of Saint George, to overt neo-Nazism on the Continent, to the Ku Klux Klan, to apartheid South Africa, to Ian Smith's Rhodesia, to the juntas of Latin America, to Marcos and Suharto, to the Duvaliers, and so forth. For that matter, the Cabinet Minister who took us in under Heath, Geoffrey Rippon, was a Monday Club stalwart. "Europe a Nation" was Mosley's slogan, and the whole idea's affinity with Fascism could not be more obvious.

It needs to be brought home to our people, among others, to whose legislative will we are now subject. Let there be a European Senate to which each of the Europarties, currently 11 in number, would nominate one Senator from each member-state at the same time as the elections to the European Parliament. That would give a total of 297, or 308 once Croatia has had the bad taste to join up.

I would rather like the European Free Alliance to nominate a member of Mebyon Kernow, because I think that it might be fun, perhaps even illuminating. But just imagine if at least the more politically aware people in this country were confronted with the figure of David Irving, or of someone who held equally noxious views about the gulags, the Holodomor and the Cultural Revolution. Imagine those potted newspaper profiles of our 11 new European Senators.

Hell, why not make them all members of the House of Commons, and allow each of the Eurofoundations to nominate a Crossbench Peer? No, probably better not to, home though that would certainly bring the point. Their numbers might turn out to be just enough to stop anything from being done about it.

The European Senate would have the power to propose amendments which the European Parliament would then be obliged to consider, and before the final text went on to the Council of Ministers the Senate would have the power to require unanimity there rather than Qualified Majority Voting. On that second point, it might even do some good.

Each member-state also needs a European Legislative Council elected by and from among the elected members of the national Parliament. 25 members would do. Seat-taking MPs would organise themselves into caucuses. The largest caucus would elect five by voting for one candidate and with the top five getting in, the second-largest would thus elect four, the third-largest three, the fourth-largest two, and the fifth-largest one.

On present figures, there would be five Conservatives, four from Labour, three Lib Dems, one each from the SNP and Plaid Cymru by arrangement between them, and one from the DUP. All seat-taking MPs would then by the same means elect 10, which would be one more from each of the Conservatives, Labour, the Lib Dems, the DUP, the SNP and Plaid Cymru, plus one from the SDLP, and the self-appointment of each of Caroline Lucas, Naomi Long and Sylvia Hermon.

At least two of the Conservatives would be from the people who for some reason think that Margaret Thatcher was a Eurosceptic, and the consistently sound school of pro-Commonwealth, anti-neoconservative Keynesians which is now given a Commons voice by Robin Walker and which has always been given a Commons voice by Sir Peter Tapsell; a third seat for a sceptic of some stripe might also be possible. At least two from Labour would be a Campaign Group member and someone like Frank Field, Kate Hoey, Gisela Stuart or Roger Godsiff. At least one Lib Dem would be of the slowly rising sceptical tendency on those benches and in that party, to whose arguments Long might also be open. The SNP members would be persuadable, and increasingly so. Anyone from the DUP or Plaid Cymru would be solidly sceptical, as are Lucas and Hermon.

Each of the European Legislative Councils would again have the power to propose amendments which the European Parliament would then be obliged to consider, and before the final text went on to the Council of Ministers half or more of them would again have the power to require unanimity there rather than Qualified Majority Voting.

And why not give the EU some Lords Spiritual? Let each member-state nominate two permanent offices the occupants of which would always be members of the European College of Guardians, or the European Board of Visitors, or what have you, one representing the country's religious and spiritual sources of moral sense and cultural identity, and the other representing the country's secular and humanist sources of moral sense and cultural identity. All very Blessed John Paul the Great.

The former offices are far easier to identify, but they could both be done, especially in academia: the Professor of Moral Philosophy at the ancient seat of learning, that sort of thing. In either case, which office it was could not be changed without the consent of all of the office-holders in the same category. Half overall, or two thirds in either category, would have the power to require unanimity in the Council of Ministers.

At present, there would be 15 Catholic hierarchs (16 with Croatia), six Lutheran ones of considerable diversity, four Orthodox, the Archbishop of Canterbury, and someone Dutch Reformed, again most obviously drawn from the ranks of senior academia rather than from among those who changed every year. There would be those who would argue that the Catholic Church ought these days to have the British, Dutch or German place, but that would only antagonise those whose support we needed.

All of this must be within the context of wider reform at our own national level.