Sign up to Fight the EU Empire

By Christopher Booker

It is some years since my old friend Antony Jay, a co-author of Yes, Minister, called the European Union "an empire without an emperor".

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Last week Jose Manuel Barroso, the President of the European Commission, acknowledged the fact, when he boasted that the EU is now an "empire", of which 27 countries, including Malta, Latvia and Britain, are just satrapies. Mr Barroso was joining in the chorus of rejoicing from political leaders all over the EU, now that nothing can stop them imposing their "constitution by any other name", to make the handover of national power to their new government all but complete.

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Whether the people of Britain (or any other country) are happy to think that they are about to live in a colony of Mr Barroso's empire is not of course something which those leaders want to see put to a popular vote. In this, no one is more determined than our own Prime Minister who, in true Orwellian fashion, proclaims his wish to see more powers given to "Parliament and the people" just when he is surreptitiously planning to hand those powers to someone else. He even glories in the support of those longtime EU fifth-columnists, Kenneth Clarke and Lords Hurd and Heseltine.

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No one should feel more ashamed of such dishonesty than Mr Brown's fellow Labour MPs, every one of whom was elected in 2005 on that solemn promise of a referendum he is now hell-bent on breaking (based on a claim that the new "Not the Constitution" is not the same as the old Constitution - to which almost every other EU leader is giving the lie).

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We have just three months to make Mr Brown honest. As a start, I suggest that every reader who believes in democracy signs the petition on the Downing Street website (http://petitions.pm.gov.uk/EU-treaty-NON) asking for a binding referendum on any and all attempts to resurrect the "constitution".

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In light of the extraordinary deception now being practised on us, it would be sad if Mr Brown, Lord Heseltine and their friends could point to only a pitiful number of signatures as evidence that, having once freed an empire, the British people were now quite happy to live in someone else's.