From Free Life (the journal of the Libertarian Alliance, Editor - Sean Gabb), No. 24, December 1995:

Treason at Maastricht almost made me angry, telling as it does the story of a betrayal which is almost the worst crime I know to have been committed. Its authors warn us of the horrors the European superstate is to visit upon our lands: how we are to be cut off, isolated, suppressed - our natural freedom taken from us. Horror!

But hang-on a second. This all sounds familiar. Isn't what the authors relay simply the present stage of a process which has been happening over a long time - that is, the unrelenting removal from individuals of their freeborn rights and the placing of them behind impenetrable layers of democratic entitlement. This cocooning prevents any attack on the core: reform is a peripheral matter and the centre of the abuse remains unaltered.

The authors are correct to call this a "modest publication", for it is neither revealing nor enjoyable. Sections of speeches, letters to the Crown Prosecution Service and the roll-call of those Lordships voting against the Maastricht Bill serve as chapters. It's very much a mish-mash of many disparate activities - ideal to dip in for specific themes, such as the painstaking tour through the treason laws, but useless as a good general reader on the opposition to the ratification of the Treaty on European Union signed at Maastricht.

What is needed is an authoritative scholarly study of euro-scepticism within the Conservative Party and of how these nationalist feelings exploded in the face of a majority Conservative government, shattering the reputation of a political machine once acclaimed as having loyalty as its secret weapon. We need to know why a previously largely deferential grassroots metamorphosed into a die-hard rebellion, appearing to put principle above power. I feel a PhD proposal coming on.

Two chapters will be of particular interest and satisfaction to hard-line ideologues. These concern the relationship of Tory MEPs with centre-right European MEPs and the alleged Nazi origins of the European Union.

The row over the links of Tory MEPs with the centre-right Christian Democrat grouping, the European Peoples Party, is really a lesson in semantics. It centres on how Tory MEPs refer to themselves when signing letters and whether they were observers or participants at the drafting of the EPP's manifesto for the 1994 Euro Elections. The reality is that they are out of step with mainstream Conservative Party thinking on European integration; and the activists plausibly see them as fifth columnists.

So striking are the similarities in the ambitions of the European state and the 1000 year Reich that it "is an exact replica of the Nazis' ideas for Europe". According to the authors we should: for "Hitler's Europe" read "Today's Europe"; for the Europaische Wirtschaftgemeinschaft read European Economic Community; for Lebensraum read European Space; for the Nazis' aim to achieve collective "access" to basic commodities read Common Agricultural Policy; for the European Currency System read European Exchange Rate Mechanism; for Europabank read European Central Bank; for European Regional Principle read Committee of the Region; for Common Labour Policy read Social Chapter; for Economic and Trading Agreements read Single Market; for European Industrial Economy read Common Industrial Policy; for "replacing capital with labour" read European Works Councils; and for "putting together all European countries" read a United States of Europe.

Though many will feel this to be a bit strong, just as many may share the suspicions of Dominic Lawson, expressed during a BBC Newsnight report on British attitudes to modern Germany - that there was no point in fighting a war to remain free from German rule if 50 years later we allow a German dominated European Union to govern us. So don't forget that it is all a German plot to run Europe. Surely the end will be the opening of a rebuilt Reichstag and its de facto governance of a European Superstate?

However the link is not, as the authors would have us believe, German desire for hegemony - but statism. It is the insatiable demand of politicians, under various banners to hide their commonality, to control more and more the decisions individuals make each day.

While arguing against a further shifting of power to European institutions, the authors unwittingly highlight the case against government itself. We learn that politicians will deceive the public, as Edward Heath did when lying about the retention of national sovereignty in the debates on the European Communities Bill in 1972. We are informed that peoples' rights are removed in "a slow, secretive but inexorable process". And even when the people speak, as in Denmark and France, the political elites ignore them and proceed with their grandiose designs for yet more integration. Even the words of the Treaty were "imprecise", "confused" and "contradictory", and this allows "potential tyrants to exploit or bypass uncertainty in the law".

The fear is that we shall be in a "permanent minority". Maybe now the political establishment will appreciate the feelings of individuals and groups who are unable to avoid being governed by the will of the majority. All this is familiar stuff to the writers of the Federalist Papers; and we have Madison et al. to thank for exposing the danger of a "tyranny of the majority". Why then are the authors still attached to Britain as a unitary state when it reproduces the same infringements of individual liberty that a central unitary Eurostate might?

Even Baroness Thatcher gets in on the act and calls for a referendum for Britain, "No elector in the country has been able to vote against Maastricht - none". Well I've got news for her. Nobody has ever been able to "vote" against democracy - never! Furthermore, as the authors state in a open letter to those Lords who voted for the ratification of the Maastricht Treaty, "you lost all the argument, but your vote was cast against democracy". But this majoritarianism is what democracy is all about. So much for them to claim that "the essence of democracy is to be ruled by people whom you can sack. We shall after Maastricht, be rules by unsackable bureaucrats and, effectively unsackable Euro-MPs." In any case, it doesn't matter whether you can sack them because the only alternative is more of the same. Why can't politics be sacked?

What the authors fail to address is the decline of the national dimension as a actor of control or that notions of power are altering. In the certainties that existed between 1945 and 1991, world power was political based on geographical territorial military might. But it is now increasingly economic. In consequence, power now knows no boundaries, and this makes trade barriers obsolete. And so we might ask whether international regimes, such as the EU, are of continuing significance.

One of the book's most important recommendations is that "the European Parliament should be recognised as an experiment which failed"; and only when "it is swept aside will the way be clear for real democracy in Europe". How strange then that they want to replace it with a nominated assembly of parliamentarians from the Member States. The authors are only half right: yes the European Parliament should be abolished, but nothing should replace it. By widening out their argument the authors should recognise that it is "democracy" itself which has failed people by enslaving them. Governments and Parliaments should be done away with and then there will not be any more sham exercises such as participatory elections. Political choice will be replaced by real sovereignty through market preferences. It is this which will bring peace and prosperity to the peoples of western, central and eastern Europe, not the creation of a phoney institutions.

Ultimately I am as unsympathetic to those defending the nation state as to those seeking to create a supra-national eurostate. Both types disagree on the appropriate level at which political power should be exercised; but they are united on the desirability of central institutions to boss the rest of us about. In effect, they are the two faces of the same coin. Power can be distributed up or down but it can never be taken outside the elites' paradigm.

Where Messrs Atkinson and McWhirter offer hope for the future is in asserting that, "The British people will not rest until they have regained their country, their Parliamentary sovereignty and their right to self government". If the treason at Maastricht has any effect, let it be that individuals are stirred to action so that we all can once more control how we live our lives.

Martin Ball