[Time Tourist]

Great article on the EU worth posting in full - since I havnt seen many EU threads here since the ratification, and the article more or less expresses my opinion more eloquently then I am able to:

So the trap has snapped shut. It was somehow apt that the politician who finally let the EU get the constitution it has craved so long should have been President Vaclav Klaus, the veteran anti-Communist who predicted, just before the Czech Republic joined the EU in 2004, that it would mean the end of his country as "an independent sovereign state". And what a delightful irony that Pravda, of all newspapers, greeted the news last week with the headline: "Twenty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the EU is now a reincarnation of the Soviet Union".
Tomorrow, as the EU's leaders gather in Berlin to celebrate the end of that wall, they will also celebrate the rise of a new one – a wall they have built around themselves, that separates Europe's politicians from all their subject peoples. From December 1, the Lisbon Treaty comes into force. (How long before they give it back its original name, "A Constitution for Europe"?) The EU will at last have the supreme government it has wanted so long – unelected, unaccountable and, as even its own polls show, less popular with those it rules over than ever before. But what do the politicians care? They have the power, and we now have a government we can never dismiss.
Of course David Cameron never wanted a referendum, which would have been a huge embarrassment to him. His promise of one was a cynical gimmick to curry favour with Euro-sceptic voters – a trick he is now repeating with a promise to work for the repatriation of powers which he must know he will never get. To do so would require a new treaty and the agreement of 27 governments to something which, as they are already making abundantly clear, is simply not on offer.
Where Mr Cameron is entirely at one with his Labour and Lib Dem counterparts is that they must never admit or explain just how much of Britain's governance has already been given away, leaving Westminster with little more power than a rather grand local council. None of them will ever discuss this because they all belong to that new Europe-wide political class that governs us from behind its wall, without ever having to ask us for our consent.
In a wistful way it has been amusing to see that former Foreign Office mandarin Sir Christopher Meyer much in evidence of late, bemoaning the way Foreign Office morale has sunk so low because so much of its old power and influence has passed to "other departments in Whitehall". What he means, of course, is that its power has departed not elsewhere in Whitehall but to this amorphous new entity which is even now constructing its own foreign ministry and diplomatic service, with embassies around the world, to replace almost everything of significance our Foreign Office once stood for. This is why the child we now have as our Foreign Secretary, David Miliband, can't wait to be part of it.
Three years ago, when I was in the beautiful city of Prague to assist President Klaus in launching a Czech edition of my history of the "European project", The Great Deception, I was intrigued to note that outside every Czech ministry there hung two flags, one Czech, the other the EU's ring of stars. It was an honest recognition of how their country was governed, a practice I suggested the British Government should follow.
The only difference now is that our ministries should cease to fly the Union Jack and hoist instead what is officially known in Brussels as "the Union Flag", that same ring of stars which, from December 1, will symbolise the true government we live under.
As a final thought, since the EU is to become a government with "legal personality" in its own right, how long will it be before its President, under the constitution, is accorded international precedence over the Queen as our head of state? Like much else in this sorry story, our new rulers will start by denying that they are even thinking of such a thing. But now they have their constitution, I bet it can't be long.

Also going to post this second article which ties in with the above:

This has been a bad week for British democracy; perhaps the worst since the start of the new century. On Wednesday, Members of Parliament who abused their right to claim expenses in the most egregious fashion were ordered to accept Sir Christopher Kelly's proposals to end such abuse – though now, as we report today, there are growing doubts that the Kelly review will be implemented in full. Also on Wednesday, David Cameron announced that, following the ratification of the Lisbon Treaty, there was no point in attempting to un-ratify it. Alas, he was right. We believe that the Tory leader was well advised to step away from a fight he was predestined to lose; but we are also aware that the British public feels profoundly betrayed. As, indeed, it has been: not by Mr Cameron but by this Government, which promised a referendum on a European Constitution and then, when one appeared in the thinnest of disguises as the Lisbon Treaty, signed it without even the appearance of remorse.
On Monday, Gordon Brown will stand alongside other European leaders to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. He will be doing so at a moment when British democracy is under great strain. Will he notice the irony of the situation? Indeed, will other national leaders recognise that they face a similar democratic crisis? The European elite like to caricature the British as the xenophobic eccentrics of the EU; one would never guess, from listening to their snooty put-downs, that it was France, not the United Kingdom, that firmly rejected the European Constitution in a referendum. Discontent is growing with the undemocratic aspects of European institutions generally, though it surfaces in different ways across the Continent. Italian Catholics feel just as strongly about the banning of crucifixes in their classrooms as (to cite a small but telling example) Britain's sea anglers feel about the EU's absurd demand that they report every fish they catch.
But we cannot blame everything on a disease originating in Brussels.
The MPs' expenses scandal, exposed by The Daily Telegraph earlier this year, was produced by a national culture of arrogant entitlement that has engulfed far too many politicians and public servants. Corruption, waste, back-slapping and bossiness are not the exclusive preserve of Eurocrats. The British establishment has become more and more alienated from public opinion – most striking, on the subject of immigration, which no major party has been prepared to debate frankly or consult us about.
There is a tendency to blame "Europe" for every piece of health and safety nonsense; in reality, the regulation is just as likely to have been devised (and gleefully enforced) by Whitehall or the town hall. New Labour has erected a vast client state devoted to policing "guidelines" and "best practice".
In theory, our historic constitutional defence against executive grandiosity is Parliament. In practice, politicians have spent the years since 1997 wandering obediently through the lobbies to vote for legislation setting up quangos whose highly paid executives promptly lobby for even more meddling laws. And so the cycle seemed set to continue undisturbed for ever – until, that is, our last remaining illusion about public life was suddenly destroyed.
We used to comfort ourselves with the thought that, however incompetent our politicians were, at least they were untouched by systemic corruption. Then the MPs' expenses scandal came to light and, within days, the reputation of the House of Commons lay in ruins. This truly is a rotten Parliament: not just in terms of the personal dishonesty of some of its members, but also in its contempt for ordinary people, who rightly take offence at their "flipping" properties or signing away historic liberties.
We do not normally like to end the week on an angry note, but no other response would reflect the feelings of our readers, instinctively so loyal to British institutions. We suspect that many of you now find yourselves in the unfamiliar position of being anti-establishment; that is understandable, because the ideal of public service has been corroded at every level at which power is exercised.
Politicians, in particular, have done their best to divert attention from their own taxpayer-funded lifestyles while also diverting our attention from uncomfortable issues that might disturb the cosy cross-party consensus. (It is worth noting that many quangos now exist to stop people saying or thinking things that might cause offence to the political class and their dinner-party allies.)
This state of affairs is potentially dangerous, for it is at times when prosperous politicians censor the free exchange of opinions that fringe parties begin to creep into the mainstream. And, this time round, even radical adjustments to manifestos will not suffice to change the mood of the electorate.
Voters have correctly concluded that it is not only the traditional British structure of government that has let us down, but also those greedy people from across the political spectrum who have managed to exploit it. Therefore Britain's main parties must do more than deliver a new set of policies at the general election, though those are badly needed: they must deliver a new, incorruptible and accountable breed of politician. Finding those people will take leadership, and we are running out of time.

[L i b]

tl;dr