This article by James Gibb Stuart appeared in the January 2001 issue of Sovereignty.

European Union was always intended to be achieved through stealth. Monnet and his collaborators, who did early work on the project in the wake of the Second World War, had already decided that their plans for a superstate incorporating all the ancient nations and cultures of Europe could never win majority support among the peoples concerned.

Left : Alistair McConnachie and James Gibb Stuart.

Thus what we thought was a Common Market of freely associated trading nations, surreptitiously spawned a European Commission ruled by unelected Commissars who worked in mysterious ways, enacting their many statutes and ordinances in closeted conclaves, far removed from the scrutiny and criticism of the peoples who paid their grossly inflated salaries and expense accounts. The very multiplicity of their output - on everything from human rights to the thickness of sausage skins - was in itself a turn-off for democracy, and for the upholders of pro bono publico. It was clear that matters of continental integration were strictly for the salaried elite. No one else was expected to interfere, or try to understand.

Came the recent EU summit meeting at Nice on the French Riviera, and the bickering and open animosities on offer were sufficient to convince all sane and sensible observers that the concept of welding fifteen, or even twenty-seven nation-states, into a single centrally controlled unit, is a recipe for indefinite strife and the progressive erosion of civic and individual freedoms.

It makes no sense, either politically or economically, except to the corporate globalisers who hope to profit from a world without frontiers. We are governed by a political junta which owes its authority to those corporate overlords, and due to the vagaries of the party system, there is no saying when an electoral majority can be assembled to overturn them. Yet ominously the spate of regulations, strictures and prohibitions continues.

So are we to be overwhelmed by the inevitability of gradualness? The Nice Treaty has given rise to some apocalyptic fears that the end of Britain as a self-governing nation-state is nigh.

Let me give a message of hope. I was once on a public platform with the late Enoch Powell, when at question time he was asked to speak to this very proposition. Powell was a renowned constitutionalist in his time, so a select audience keenly awaited what he had to say.

He replied that there is no law or edict which can resist the combined will of the British people to change or abolish it.

Thus that which had been stealthily imposed could just as overtly be removed. To him it was the majority consciousness and the public weal which was paramount, not any overriding assumptions by a supranational authority.

His opinion is no less relevant today than on the afternoon when it was given. We're so much further on. But time is not on the side of the globalisers. Nothing is inevitable. We shall still have an opportunity to take back what we have lost.

As John Ashworth of Save Britain's Fish, pointed out in a letter in the 1^st December 2000 eurofacts: "It is correct that the joining condition of any Nation to the European Union is to accept the acquis communautaire [the entire body of EU law] in full, but in the British case that is only done with the consent of a British Act of Parliament. The other Member States knew that when we joined.

"That is why all EU Treaties, and the Regulations and Directives that flow from those EU Treaties have to go through an Act of Parliament, but that Act is created under the British Constitution, not the Treaty rules.

"It is the right of a British Parliament to pick and choose, because a new Parliament is not bound by what a previous Parliament has done. The other Member States might not like it, but as there is no European Union mechanism to throw a Nation out, they would have to sit down and negotiate the matter.

"Various sections of the acquis communautaire go through different British Acts, all in turn amending the European Communities 1972 Act, but if you wanted to leave the European Union, then you still have to amend the Act, and that Act can be amended in full or part.

"The reference for British membership of the EU is firstly through the Act, not the Treaty.

"If it was the other way round the UK could only withdraw from the EU by the unanimous agreement of the other Members or by force.

"Thankfully that is not the case and never can be, because the British Parliament has not the legal authority to create such a position.

"The very serious error being continually made is the belief that an EU Treaty overrides the British Constitution."

And as barrister Michael Shrimpton wrote in the same edition of eurofacts: "The fact that the Consolidated Treaty of European Union is concluded for an unlimited period (article 312) means no more than that the Treaty does not expire automatically on a certain date. Most international treaties, e.g. the UN Charter, are concluded for an unlimited period. There is no magic in the expression, nor does it limit the rights of sovereign states to withdraw from a multi-lateral treaty.

".... No serious international lawyer would deny that the right of self-determination is a peremptory norm, indeed it is the pre-eminent example ....

"The EU is powerless in the international plane to prevent UK withdrawal from the Treaty of Rome and any attempt to do so would be an Act of War, justifying an armed response ....

"So far as British law is concerned the position under our own glorious Constitution admits of no doubt. Parliament cannot bind its successors and remains free to repeal or amend the European Communities Act 1972 at will, either expressly (as proposed in the Fishery Limits Bill 1996) or impliedly (as in the Weights and Measures Act 1985)."

Given these above facts, what we are witnessing is a failure of the will of our present political class to develop and promote the alternatives.

Let us remember that a British Parliament, properly motivated, can come out at any time. Therefore, we need political leadership with the will to make a stand for national sovereignty and which will develop and promote a new direction for our nation.

Let us find and support such people now.