IAN M Bill (Letters, June 10) considers David Cameron the worst Prime Minister in living memory, worse, even, than Theresa May and presumably even worse than Tony Blair, whose unprovoked butchery in Iraq was rewarded by the EU, US, Russia and the UN through his appointment as their representative “peace envoy” to the Middle East and who – having devoted his recent years to the instruction of developing countries on the principles of democracy – has now set up an office in London to promote world governance.
But Mr Bill and many thousands like him see the world only through the prism of party politics. And it is where domestic and international interests meet that we should look for the worst Prime Minister in living memory.
Some 20 years ago the European Commission published its White Paper on Governance and EU Commissioner Peter Mandelson, the closest friend of Tony Blair, was able to declare “the age of pure representative democracy is coming to an end”. Although individuals across the EU are still being urged to use the ballot box, unelected and immovable “community” organisations of grass-roots Britain are now empowered to the detriment of our cash-strapped elected councils.
Parliamentary sovereignty, of course, has increasingly become atrophied through the superiority of EU/EEC law and MPs are reduced to squabbling along party lines over issues they are unable to influence and never understood in the first place. We owe both these attritions of democratic government to one man.
Ted Heath, long an ardent devotee of European integration, subjected the British people to a lie that puts Boris Johnson’s bus and even Alastair Campbell’s tanks at Heathrow in the shade. While the European Movement was conducting its public relations campaign at enormous expense, Whitehall was preparing its notorious secret memorandum of 1971 on Sovereignty, where mandarins claimed that membership of the then EEC would involve no significant loss of UK sovereignty – followed by a less than comprehensive list of significant areas that would indeed be affected in what had long been acknowledged as an embryonic United States of Europe, a body which traces its conception back (as Duncan McAra pointed out in his letter of May 31) to a British civil servant in the 1920s.
Having convinced Parliament that the EEC Treaty concerned little more than a free-trade agreement and was wholly beneficial, Heath won approval to sign it in 1972 and Harold Wilson, in 1975, succeeded in persuading a British public – even less informed on the true nature of the project than their parliamentary representatives – to vote, in its first and only referendum on the subject, for the surrender of its sovereignty at both national and international levels.
Some so-called Brexiters, made EU citizens without a vestige of consultation, who have troubled to read EU treaties and white papers and to note their effect on national laws, simply resent being victims of the massive confidence trick perpetrated in 1972 by arguably the worst Prime Minister in living memory.
Mary Rolls, Jedburgh.
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