Gerald Warner: Your last chance to make a break from the Evil Empire

IF YOU are sentimental about anniversaries you might want to have a few friends in to celebrate a popular festival: the Court of Auditors has refused to sign off the European Union’s accounts for the 18th year in succession.

Gosh. What will happen? Absolutely nothing; it will be business as usual for the Brussels kleptarchy. Directors of private enterprises would be investigated, sacked or jailed for such illegal behaviour, but the nomenklatura of the EUSSR remains untouchable.

The parallel has recently become more exact, since the Evil Empire is rapidly approaching its Berlin Wall moment. The lunacy of imposing, for political instead of economic motives, a synthetic currency that confined such disparate economies as Germany and Greece within the same straitjacket is causing the Eurozone to implode. That, in turn, will destroy the EU since some nations eventually – after suffering untold economic and social torment – will have to be allowed to escape. At that point the artificially driven momentum towards federalism will go into reverse gear and a contracting European ‘project’ will succumb to the old dictum of Prussian foreign policy: “We must grow greater or we shall grow less.”

Britain, however, may be in the happy position of making a voluntary exit rather than staying on stage for the last act of Götterdämmerung. Euroscepticism, once a derided “eccentricity” in the propaganda of our discredited political class, is now the majority view. Its growth has been rapid, even exponential, as public patience with the self-serving clique in Brussels has finally evaporated. For this healthy development we owe a vote of thanks to that unlikeliest of candidates for Eurosceptic bouquets: David Cameron. Dave’s mega-porkie – his “cast-iron guarantee” of a referendum on the Lisbon Treaty – proved to be a provocation too far. Even moderate Europhiles were struck by the unreasonableness of not giving the electorate a voice and by the infamy of the deception which, coming in tandem with the MPs’ expenses scandal, opened many formerly unseeing eyes to the squalor prevailing on the slime-green benches.

Over the years 2010-11, opinion polls showed approximately 49 per cent of respondents in favour of leaving the EU. Considering the pro-EU figures were significantly less, that was a quantum leap in anti-EU sentiment. The past year has seen the final breakthrough to massive public discontent with EU membership and willingness to leave the Union. The recent opinion surveys tell their own story: ICM, 24 October, 49 per cent out, 40 per cent in; Opinium/Observer, 17 November, 56 per cent out, 30 per cent in. The only party with a majority of voters in favour of continued EU membership is the Lib Dems, who are now two points behind UKIP.

In a country with an accountable government, such public sentiment could have only one outcome; but this is a parliamentary democracy, so the popular will is of no account. All this seismic movement in opinion will do is challenge the complicit party leaders to find ever more devious ways of circumventing the will of electors. Look out for more posturing and ham acting from Dave on the European stage, more weasel words from Ed Miliband and a lot of temper tantrums from Baby Clegg, the Eurosceptics’ best asset.

Votes for prisoners? Not a problem: all the British government has to do is give six months’ notice of our withdrawal from the European Court of Human Rights. That, however, would leave our politicians excluded from their comfort zone: the esteem of their fellow crooks and hypocrites in the European political class, the approval of the Guardian, the regard of the disgraced and equally corrupt BBC. To those pressure groups the consensual political parties pay more attention than to the lowly voters, on the calculation that if the three main Westminster gangs hold together on Europe, immigration, crime, same-sex marriage, high taxation, “green” madness and all the other orthodoxies of the liberal consensus, then the prejudices of the mug punters in the polling booths may safely be ignored. All that is required is some cosmetic rhetoric and theatricals to appease the public.

That calculation may no longer hold. The European Union costs Britain £50m a day; it makes more than 70 per cent of our laws and is currently overruling Parliament on votes for prisoners, deportation of terrorists, etc. Theresa May, as Home Secretary, has opted in to the European Investigation Order, enabling foreign police to tap telephones, examine British bank accounts and even take British subjects’ DNA. Britain is a “net contributor” (ie sucker), pouring ever larger amounts of taxpayers’ money into the Brussels slush fund. The EU has done nothing for us; we have gained no conceivable benefit from membership. It is time to leave, before the whole rotten edifice collapses on top of us.

Twitter: @GeraldWarner1