Ooh, an article by top New Labour scrote Alan ‘go ahead, make my day punk’ Milburn in the Graun. It’s almost guaranteed to be interesting. Well, in the way that watching a drunkard chase a bottle of White Lightning down…

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The United Kingdom currently holds the revolving office of the Presidency of the European Union. Home Secretary Charles Clarke and the Home Office has presented a paper to the European Parliament in Strasbourg, outlining some of the dubious Policy Laun…

Because in spite of all the spin, they genuinely believe they know best, and are doing the right thing. They just don’t think they can sell it, which is why they’re doing it by stealth (c.f. every other bloody Blairite reform…).

This is exactly backwards. The EU, amongst other things, gives national politicians the chance to do things by the dark of the moon that they couldn’t do otherwise. Europe is the way it is because national politicians make it so. If it’s a sellout you’re looking for, you don;t need to go higher than national level.

Trouble is, though, that in theory at least the EU can be used for these sorts of purposes. Now, of course, so can plenty of other non-transparent tricks-of-the-political-trade, point taken, but it doesn’t mean that if this goes through that the very existence of this route is not itself a problem. Close ’em all (as far as is practical), on an entirely equal opportunities basis, of course.

… Home Secretary Clark not only wants us to trade in warm hearty security, giving away dubious civil rights…

The only thing I don’t understand is why they’ve got their little hearts so set on ID? It makes no sense whatsoever to spend such a vast amount of money on something which has no real practical use. None of the arguments they’ve put forward actually work if you look at them for thirty seconds, so what the hell are they up to?

It’s much the same tactic as they’ve used with the Parliament Act and House of Lords (1949-1999 Parliament Act used five times; 1999-2004 Parliament Act used three times) – abuse systems which normally work perfectly well by finding loopholes and routes intended for entirely other purposes to force through legislation which, even with their huge majority, they can’t get through parliament by conventional means.

The EU, in this case, is a fairly benign tool – if it wasn’t that, it’d be other methods – hence Blair’s recent cozying up to that bastion of human rights and freedom that is China to gain their support at the UN for abolishing the “don’t deport people to be tortured” rule. And they’ll probably still try and get it through parliament and then use the Parliament Act again in a couple of years after the Lords do their best to hold it up.

Blaming the EU for this is much like blaming the knife that has stabbed you, rather than the person who was weilding it. (And, in any case, it hasn’t happend – yet. Hence the need for wide publicity to discourage them from pursuing this utterly dishonourable course.)