I have to admit to you these are not my words. They are the words of Dick Cheney, America’s Vice President, on the stump three days ago. And we all know what he is talking about.

But his words apply equally to our fight in the United Kingdom against the growing EU state, which seeks to destroy us. It seeks to take over our central government and our local government. It seeks to take over our nation.

It is more than 50 years since this project  - one European country - first saw the light of day with the European Coal and Steel Community. Little by little, and more recently in great chunks, everything which we hold dear is being taken from us. Governments whether Labour or Conservative have given away British freedoms - they have said yes to the EU more often than they have said no.

Before showing how regionalisation may in the future help to destroy this nation, let us look at how much power we have already lost, so you will see that indeed I am talking about an extreme situation.

I have been tracking our demise as you know over many years now – my second book (The Last Days of Britain, The Final Betrayal) covers this ground in some detail.

My best guess is that today three quarters of all the Bills that go through the House of Commons and the House of Lords are at Brussels’ behest.

Here’s a checklist.

We do not control our own farming, our own fishing, our own trade policy (we last negotiated and signed a trade treaty on behalf of our businessmen in 1975), the environment (all that health and safety legislation).

Legal supremacy has gone  - the European Court of Justice in Luxembourg can overrule everything.

Our foreign policy is constrained; so too our ability to run our own economy – though thank God we have not yet succumbed to the euro. We have limits on our ability to tax - don’t forget that VAT is a Brussels tax introduced under Labour as a preparation for joining the then EEC.

Defence is under attack, our legal system is being eroded, policing is threatened, even our freedom of speech is restricted.

Let’s look at it a different way.

It is as though about three quarters of Britain was invaded, occupied and run by a foreign power – from Dover to Carlisle from Lands End to Newcastle – no longer independently British but with a client government in London.

You may think I am over egging it, over gilding the lily to mix metaphors. Years of being told that we are partners, co-operating nation states, we are in a club, all very civilised, may have dulled our senses. As it was deliberately intended to do. 

It sounds extreme, it is extreme.

That is the attack on our central government. But the process of dividing the UK into regions is the other half of the coin – it is a Brussels’ led attack on our democratic local government and replacing it with what the EU calls consultative democracy.

This country is already divided into 12 regions – three of them have an elected assembly – London, Scotland and Wales. Northern Ireland is in cold storage awaiting better times.

And on November 4^th (2004) the North East will be the first to vote in an all-postal referendum to decide whether or not to have an elected regional assembly. If they vote no they will still have the Assembly.

That’s how much a sham the whole thing is.

How did it come about?

Mr Prescott the Deputy Prime Minister says that the regions are his idea, and his idea alone and he has been working on it for 30 years. Wrong, Mr Prescott.

The EU Commission and its few British Quislings say that the source is the all British Wartime Commissions, which remained in civil defence planning for several decades after the end of the war. Wrong again.

It’s all in the treaty of Rome and in the acquis commaunitaire.

The Preamble of the 1957 treaty includes this: ‘to strengthen the unity of their economies and ensure their harmonious development by reducing the differences existing between the various regions and backwardness of the less favoured regions’. The treaty clauses are peppered with references to regions.

The 1960s was a decade of advance for the EEC’s regional policy. In 1961 the European Commission held its first conference and set up three committees to look at running regional policy across the EEC.

These reports formed the basis of the 1965 First Commission Communication on Regional Policy. The Commission emphasised that its authority on regions came from the treaty of Rome and said every country must draw up regional economic policies.

The First Community Economic Programme of 1966 to 1970 emphasised integrating regional with national policies.

Working parties of senior civil servants from member states met regularly to advise on regional policy.

In 1969 in a second more substantial statement, the Commission said that all economic and social policy had to be determined at the European level or the region but NOT by nation states…and I quote ‘if member states were to remain responsible for regional policy then development of the Community would be jeopardised’.

The EEC began to give grants on a regional basis ensuring that the member countries would eventually change their systems of local government to receive crumbs from the Brussels’ table.  That has a name – it is bribery.

So when we signed the treaty of Rome British local government was doomed. We signed up to regional government. We signed up to that EU statement ‘if member states were to remain responsible for regional policy then development of the Community would be jeopardised.’

Do you remember a debate about it in the Commons? No - there wasn’t one. But there is no doubt that both Labour and Conservative governments  - Wilson’s, Callaghan’s and Heath’s all knew. They were part of it. They just didn’t tell us.

Now fast-forward 30 years. What we see emerging is highly centralised power; few checks and balances; minimal democracy; influence given to unelected vested interests.

We are in what Brussels calls the Post Democratic Era.

The London Assembly is an example of the extreme centralisation of power that is taking place in all 12 British regions. I was going to stand for the Conservatives for the London Assembly, but when I investigated what I would actually do should I be elected, I realised the best I could achieve would be to write to Ken Livingstone and he could then throw my paper in the bin.

I would probably be representing the voters to a waste paper basket. The same centralising of power is true in all the Assemblies, elected or unelected.

Ken’s powers of patronage are extreme – those of a 21st century baron.

He appoints all 15 members of Transport for London; all 16 members of the London Development Agency; nearly half of the London Fire and Emergency Planning Authority; the board of the Cultural Strategy Group; the London Health Commission executive and just over half of the Metropolitan Police Authority. He has a role in the appointment, discipline and removal of senior police officers. That should start alarm bells ringing!

An explosion of new posts surrounds every regional assembly.  There are the

civil servants, the lobby groups and, another 50 and more new quangos. The cost to all of us is huge.

Let me concentrate on the lobbyists. 'Unelected stakeholders' is a concept foreign to Britain. A stakeholder is the antithesis of democracy. But these supplicants sit in the unelected assemblies. When the assemblies are eventually elected, the lobbyists will be banished to committee rooms - for form’s sake - but they will still be part of the Assembly.

Because there are not enough seats for all of them, new organisations represent a mish mash of lobby groups simply to produce a single member to ‘represent’ them in the assemblies.

For example, every region now has a Council of Faiths to represent Christians, Jews, Buddhists, Bahais, Muslims, Sikhs, Hindus, Druids and Pagans. That produces one man to sit in the assembly. In the South West Assembly it happens to be a Quaker from North Somerset.

A new network of Economic Partnerships represents councils, health trusts, universities, and government quangos. Again one person represents these different groups inside the Assembly.

Add in the CBI, the TUC, ethnic minorities, Help the Aged the UK Youth Parliament for those aged between 11 and 18 and too young to vote but not too young for the Assemblies. And on and on.

Even more bizarre, an organisation or council can be represented in the Assembly through several different stakeholders, so diffuse is the structure. It’s a veritable cats’ cradle.

But it isn’t democracy. It isn’t transparent. What happened to one man, one vote?

So far the Assemblies have limited powers – no doubt they will get more but we have not yet been allowed to know what they might be – we are in the dark. At present they write strategic plans within the Brussels spatial plan and lobby Brussels for money.

And to lobby for money the regions have permanent offices in Brussels. So too do the county councils. There are over 150 such offices in Brussels representing regions across the European Union.

For what is happening in this country is also happening across the EU. Every country is divided into regions, sub regions, and sub sub regions, interlinked by roads, railways, electricity cables and gas pipelines to ensure dependency on neighbouring regions and to cut across national borders deliberately with the aim of destroying them. All induced by grants from Brussels.

Who defines a region? Well it isn’t us. HMG in its White Paper ‘Your Region Your Choice’ says ‘that it is not necessary for a region to have a strong historic identity to create a modern one,’ adding boundaries will ‘generate a good deal of fervour’ but no one will be able to come up with better ones so the ‘standard regional boundaries are right.’ That begs the question of whose ‘standard’ boundaries.

The answer is Eurostat, the EU’s statistical service in Luxembourg. These boundaries have been used since at least 1961 in Community legislation. And it’s all done by population.

Last year this system was enforced throughout EU by regulation - every local authority has to use it. The excuse was the enlargement of EU. Her are the populations for the regions:

Region                     3 million             7 million
Sub region               800,000             3 million
Sub sub region        150,000              800,000

In the UK we already have regions but now here are sub regions and sub sub regions.

The division of this country has still further to go right down to the parish councils.

In the Brussels' plan London is region number UKI with 2 sub regions: an outer and an inner. And London will have five sub sub regions.

Ken Livingstone says he will abolish the 32 London boroughs 5 super boroughs, neatly fitting that Brussels plan.

There will be no City of London and there will be far reaching financial and planning repercussions.

Every county council will be abolished. Devon County Council is now a sub sub region of the EU, UKK43, pending its abolition.

And there will be no England.

We in the reunited Kingdom are going through huge changes, but what is happening elsewhere in the EU? Here are some examples:

• France has real problems. President Mitterand in 1982 created 22 regions with limited powers. But President Chirac campaigned in 2002 on decentralisation assuring electors that the first article of the French constitution, France is ‘a single and indivisible republic’, was sacrosanct. In France this has not been presented as EU issue: it is simply a matter for France. If it succeeds the map of France will revert to the way it looked in mediaeval times.

• Portugal voted ‘no’ to regions in a 1998 referendum. But the next year regional development agencies were imposed on the Portuguese: Unelected partnerships of local vested interests or stakeholders.

• Poland had to change to join EU, applicant countries now have to. In 1998 its 49 provinces were abolished and 16 regions introduced.

• The only ones not to change are the 16 German Lander

I have painted a dispiriting, disheartening and dire picture. Successive British Governments have sold us out.

All of us in this hall and many more besides are fighting back. So let me return to my introductory remarks. Faced with this attack we cannot negotiate, appease or reason. The only way is out.

© Lindsay Jenkins 2004
London, October 2004