Flying Free (24 page)

He was equally adamant on the subject five months later when he told Parliament, ‘There will not be a referendum. The reason is that the Constitution does not fundamentally change the relationship between the EU and the UK… There is a proper place where this Constitution can be debated. It is Parliament…’

Wow. Parliament a proper place for debate. Even that was a huge concession. British troops had been in Iraq for six months as Blair spoke.

‘…It has to pass through both Houses of Parliament and I think it is preferable to do that than to have a situation, as I know some of the Conservatives and Eurosceptics want, where we literally for the next few months in the country debate the intricacies of the Constitution.’

In so far as this gibberish can be picked clear of its incomprehensible wadding (‘literally for the next few months in the country’??), I think that it means, ‘The British people may have elected me, but they’re far too stupid to decide their own future and I might not have a majority there, where I have one (just) here.’

But at least by March 2004, the debate was no longer about a tidying-up exercise. ‘In any debate in the country [??] the choice is absolutely fundamental. It is between those who want to renegotiate Britain’s essential terms of entry and those who believe Britain’s future lies in Europe. And I believe that is a debate we can and will win.’

Hang on. Last year, the constitution did ‘not fundamentally change the relationship between the EU and the UK’. Now it is ‘absolutely fundamental’. Heigh-ho. Anyhow, let’s have that debate.

Er, no. By 17 April, the wind had veered. Blair was back on message. ‘Our policy has not changed and if there is any question of it changing, we will tell you.’

The wind backed. Blair spun. Three days later, on 20 April 2004, he announced that there would be a referendum after all. This was in fact a purely opportunistic tactical move. By this volte-face, he not only shot the Tory fox but blasted it to smithereens. The Tories had to pulp their entire run of election addresses for the forthcoming election on 10 June.

He made it clear that he was merely playing games the very next day, incidentally indicating that he was now a true Eurocrat. He had no intention of actually being bound by the referendum. Should the British people be so impertinent as to disagree with their servants, ‘we will be in exactly the same position as, for example, Ireland after its rejection for the first time round of the Nice Treaty, which means if we were in government we would sit down obviously and have to discuss the way forward with other European countries’.

This means, in Blairspeak, ‘Don’t bother. We’ll find a way of disregarding your will either way.’

Nonetheless, with a little help from the Tories in their quest for ‘clear blue water’, we had attained the concession. We were to have our referendum. Blair’s political jockeying left Chirac in France no choice but to follow suit.

Blair may have stymied the Tories, but it availed him little. We were the only party to make substantial gains in those elections. The public had rumbled the others.

Spain was the first country to have a referendum. Unsurprisingly, given the extent to which she has benefited from the Union (‘If Spain had been out of the European Union, by now we would be an extension of north Africa,’ said Josep Borrell, and she has long been the largest net beneficiary of EU transfers, not to mention British fisheries), 76 per cent of the derisory 43 per cent of Spaniards who bothered voted ‘Yes’. I addressed a rally in Madrid on behalf of the ‘No’ faction, but we had little chance.

Then, on 29 May 2005, came France’s turn. The ‘No’ side was desperately short of cash, so I organised a whip-round amongst the MEPs. Each of us receives some €50,000 per annum from the ‘information budget’, which is intended for the promotion of the MEP and the dissemination of knowledge about the EU. We were disseminating information about the EU, even if it was not the information which they particularly wished disseminated. Between us, we raised €200,000 which we handed to Philippe de Villiers, president of the Vendée and head of the ‘No’ movement.

Five days before the referendum, I scored a major coup.

One of the team, the indefatigable and inventive Gawain Towler, had suggested that I submit a written question regarding the hospitality and holidays which Commissioners had received since their nominations.

We received no official answer. The Commission met, as ever, in strict secrecy, claimed a right of privacy and declared that there had been no impropriety. A public-spirited Commission vice-president, however, leaked the truth to
Die Welt
. The Commission’s president, José Manuel Barroso, had spent a week on the yacht of Greek shipping billionaire Spiro Latsis.

There is no reason, of course, why the charming Mr Barroso, a former Maoist social democrat, should not cavort on gin-palaces with one of the
world’s richest men, but it had surely been more tactful not to have done so just a month before the Commission approved a €10.3 million contract with Latsis’s shipping company.

It also emerged that the ubiquitous Peter Mandelson had spent New Year’s Eve on
Octopus
, the yacht of Microsoft’s co-founder Paul Allen, off St Barthélemy.

Again, it may well have been that their conversations on that festive night were merely about yachts, of which Mandelson has since, though a socialist, shown himself to be an aficionado and of which
Octopus
is a notable specimen, boasting two helicopters on the top deck (one up front and one at the back), a 63-foot tender (just one of seven aboard), a pool and, er … two submarines.

It would again have been better, however, had Mandelson not had his dubious record and had Microsoft not at the time been the subject of a major EU investigation. The Commission had the previous year fined Microsoft £355 million for abusing its near monopoly in the software market. The Commission was still battling with the company, of which Allen was a major shareholder, as to how they could verify compliance, and had the power to impose a daily fine of five per cent of Microsoft’s huge global turnover.

In such circumstances, although no impropriety was or is alleged, it is clearly inappropriate that a Trade Commissioner should be linking arms and singing ‘Auld Lang Syne’ with the company’s founder.

These revelations caused a sensation. For once, MEPs of all political complexions and origins were shocked at their secretly self-appointed masters’ total disregard for the electors. I had to muster the signatures of just 10 per cent of them to compel Barroso to appear before the parliament, there to face examination and a motion of censure.

Given the number of members who had expressed their disgust, I thought that it would be easy enough to find seventy-five, but, of course, the great machine ground into action. A Maltese socialist who had signed the petition mysteriously withdrew. It was then announced that all Socialists who signed would be expelled.

The British Tories were also forbidden to sign. To their enormous credit, six of them defied the whip and signed notwithstanding. The gallant Roger Helmer had the whip withdrawn in consequence.

For all this, I got my signatures. The Commission could not for once bully its way out of at least some accountability. I was still an inept virgin as far as parliamentary procedure was concerned, but our secretary general in the Ind/Dem group, Herman Verheirstraeten, works the parliament’s arcane mechanisms with the same – to me mystifying – skill and ingenuity as an eleven-year-old with his laptop. He somehow worked it so that the debate would be held in Brussels just four days before the French were to vote.

It was a scene reminiscent of a real democratic debating chamber. There was excitement and bustle – a rare sense that we, the members, might make a difference. As with the election of the Commission, there could be no censure of individual Commissioners but only of the entire body. In a scene which, I fear, will be seen again in far darker days, all twenty-five Commissioners were on parade. I proposed the motion of censure.

Barroso continued to plead that his holidays were nobody’s business but his own. In a dazzling rhetorical flourish which I last encountered at
prep-school
, he sullenly informed an awestruck world that ‘Mr Farage would never be found on a luxury yacht because he has no friends!’

I reeled, I can tell you.

Roger Helmer had discovered that he was permitted to make interventions. Here was one man to whom we are always delighted to yield the floor. ‘Does Mr Farage agree that the EPP Group has tried to stop us from supporting the motion and that this has been supported by the leader of the British Conservatives, Timothy Kirkhope, and does he not think such action reprehensible?’

I simply said, ‘Yes.’

There was much laughter, and Roger was at once booted out of the EPP.

We lost the debate, of course. That had been a foregone conclusion. British media coverage was minimal. That had been a foregone conclusion too. They just sort of whistled and thrust their hands in their pockets and talked about the weather or something. Throughout continental Europe, however, the whole story was massive. After the Barrot affair, it seems to have established me as the public voice for the millions of Eurosceptics throughout the continent.

On the Sunday before the referendum, I addressed 7,000 passionate French activists at a rally in Paris. My French is, frankly,
épouvantable
(or bloody awful – one of the few words which I have somehow picked up), and I can only pray that my accent was a little less shameful than that of arch-supranationalist Heath. I read a text prepared and rehearsed with my staff. When in doubt, I returned to my mantra, ‘
Dites-leur NON!
’

A kindly commentator named Michelle Draye recorded that I had made my speech in ‘
un français parfait
’. I worry for her hearing, but love her for her optimism.

I returned to France on the night when the results were announced. I smiled weakly at Barrot who was also there. I refrained from asking him just how it felt to have misappropriated just less than the Great Train Robbers and to have been rewarded not with a life sentence but with a huge income, pension and mastery over a continent. I was too busy praying.

God bless the bolshy, determined, truculent, independent French. We may on occasion curse them because we have so often been the victims of that truculence, but, unlike so many of our countrymen and women, they know how to stand up for their own. They had suffered for centuries under an autocratic monarchy and oligarchy. They did not want to accept the domination of a far less elegant but equally impervious version.

Sixty-two per cent of them had turned out, and 55 per cent of them had said ‘No’. I was that night kissed by a vast number of French women – and men, there were lots of delightful and this time voluntary European unions and we did wonderful things for the French balance of payments, particularly that of the Epernay region.

Three days later, the results of the Dutch referendum were announced. The Brussels parliament was in session, but we organised a small informal party in the Press Bar. The result was better than even we had hoped. Some 62 per cent of the Dutch people – who, like the French, have memories of obedience to force majeure and do not like it – had voted. An overwhelming 61 per cent of these had delivered a resounding ‘No’.

Again, the champagne corks popped and the cheers rang through the building. Our small, informal gathering rapidly became a large and chaotic piss-up.

We had done it!

No fewer than 64.3 million French citizens and 16.4 million Dutch had been asked if they wished to cede self-determination and had democratically stated that they did not. In a sane and decent world which played by the rules, that was the end of the Constitution.

I was brimming over with champagne, gratitude and goodwill, but I swear that I was not crowing – or not outwardly at least – when I saw German arch-federalist and socialist Jo Leinen on the corridor, walked out to him and offered him a glass of champagne. I was simply being gracious in victory.

‘Bad luck, Jo,’ I said. ‘Come and have a drink with us anyway.’

He fixed me with a glare and made a noise as though they were moving a piano on bare boards down in his gut. ‘You may have your little victory tonight,’ he said softly and very precisely, spitting out the words in soft chunks, ‘but we have fifty different ways to win…’

He stalked on.

The blood drained from my face and neck as I watched him go.

I knew that I was no longer living in a Europe which respected the will of the people, but I had never realised that its leaders could so explicitly reject their employers’ clearly stated desires.

Leinen the socialist and lover of the people had just declared that he despised the people. He and his friends belonged to an autonomous, totalitarian ruling class. The people were wholly irrelevant.

The rules stated that all member-states must ratify the Constitution if it were to proceed, so why, after so unequivocal a rejection, did the Luxembourg referendum proceed? Lord knows. Perhaps the Commission wished to claim that the score was 2-2, for all that Luxembourg’s total population is a trifle smaller than that of Croydon.

In Luxembourg, as in Spain, we thought that we had no hope. Fifteen per cent of the entire duchy’s GDP comes from the EU institutions on its soil. Prime Minister Jean-Claude Juncker threatened to resign should the people vote ‘No’. The media were unanimously in favour. The parliament had already voted ‘Yes’.

Jens-Peter Bonde and I paid a visit to see if we could lend a hand. We discovered the ‘No’ faction to have no funding and no infrastructure. At
the meeting which we addressed, there seemed to be just a motley but charming collection of libertarians with widely different and sometimes very odd agendas.

We underestimated Luxembourg and the sturdy independence which had kept her autonomous and fighting for freedom for so long, even when invaded. The ‘Yes’ faction won, but only by 56 per cent. Considering that 40 per cent of the population consists of first-generation EU and eastern European immigrants, this is a remarkable and far from unequivocal result.