Tim Anderson

Maastricht is when everything started to unravel for Brussels. The British people weren’t given a vote on the most significant constitutional change in the country’s modern history. Ironically, it is arch-remoaner John Major who therefore laid the key foundation for Brexit, by forcing the UK into a governance structure that didn’t meet British people’s democratic standards, or the belief many held in a more laissez-faire state. The bureaucratic, stifling, undemocratic nature of the EU is now on full show. Only a fanatic or paid agent of the project would deny it today. Eurosceptic parties are leading polls across Europe. In many instances, those parties are only being kept out of power by broad pro-EU coalitions cooked up in Brussels that don’t agree on much besides their unwavering faith in the EU. When that strategy fails, the EU executive interferes directly. Cancelling elections as in Romania, or by withholding billions in funding from the very taxpayers who sent that money to Brussels in the first place, as in Hungary or Poland. Here the game is particularly crude and thuggish: vote for the people we approve, and only then will we give you your money back. If that also fails, the EU elite are now also reverting to lawfare, as seen in France and Germany. Voters in the two most important EU countries are now awake to the EU’s many failings, and the bigwigs in Paris, Berlin and Brussels are scared. But rather than listen to voters discontent, admit to mistakes, or offer to rethink European governance going forward and perhaps curtail the EU’s insatiable and disastrous thirst for power, legal means are used to try and ban candidates and parties that don’t toe the Brussels line. The project is thus drawing the inevitable conclusions that all institutions with great power but little public support take: 🔊 The people are wrong. 🔊 Their favourite politicians must be assets of an enemy power. 🔊 We must control media, speech and democracy to protect the people from themselves. This is endgame strategy though, and it is incredibly dangerous. But because the EU elite are surrounded by “yes” men and a largely subservient media, many don’t connect the dots as I am doing here. The scary reality isn’t being properly acknowledged, and so the establishment sees no reason to backdown. The hubris is dialled up to eleven. The emperor is stark bollock naked, and yet nobody dare tell him it’s time to get off the stage. As a consequence, voters continue to flood away from the old dominant European parties in their millions, but those parties are fully integrated into the EU project and the thousands of well paid jobs that the EU ecosystem funds. So, and this is the really dangerous part, if power won’t admit they are getting things badly wrong, and won’t allow people outside of their club to gain power in Brussels or in European capitals, the elite running the project has no choice but to turn against the people themselves, to defend the institutions that granted them their wealth and status. This is how so many big political projects collapsed in the past, and it’s hard to see today why the EU should be any different. Let’s hope some sensible people at the top are aware of this and actively considering ways to get Europe out of this quagmire that don’t involve authoritarianism and the end of democratic freedom.