Simon Heffer on the EU, passports and metric

One of the better bits I have seen on the George Orwell inspired EU.

On passports he rips the EU a new one:

Your passport currently says, as it has long done, that Her Britannic Majesty's Principal Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs politely (but with some pomp and circumstance) requests that any other nation extending hospitality to the British traveller should jolly well look after him, or her.

The idea from our masters - although denied by the Minister for Europe - is that from 2010 this should be replaced by a formula stating that the bearer is a citizen of the European Union.

A cry went up, remarkably spontaneously, in my heart when I read this, as I feel sure it did in the hearts of millions of my fellow countrymen.

I am not a citizen of the bloody European Union, except on a technicality. I am an Englishman and a subject of Her Majesty the Queen. I intend to remain that way, and when I go abroad I wish that last point to be made abundantly clear on my passport.

I do not wish to have what remains of my national identity, of which I am inordinately proud, subsumed into the sovietised European empire by these menacing Orwellian bureaucrats whom I have never elected and who have never had the manners or the decency to ask me what I feel about these important matters.

On switching over to metric:

Until yesterday, we were supposed to agree to the wishes of our masters that we should no longer sell beer or milk in pints or mark our signposts in miles - or face the consequences.

Now Mr Verheugen has said that this argument is "pointless". He, and the sovietised empire that he represents, have given up.

It gets even better:

Orwell himself, years before the invention of what is now the EU, understood the totalitarian symbolism of imposing an alien system of weights and measures on a nation.

Airstrip One has been metricated. Old men sit in pubs drinking beer and fretting that a half litre is not enough and a litre is too much. Until yesterday, we were headed for Airstrip One.

But he is not finished yet:

The sale of goods generally in imperial measures should not be an offence. Ounces, pounds, stones, quarters and hundredweights of fruit and vegetables should once more be trafficked across our islands. So should cheese and meat.

Petrol should be sold in gallons, not least so we can see how expensive it is. If I wish to buy a yard of sand or a yard of cloth, it should be my right to do so, and the right of a tradesman to sell it to me.

This is not just so that we can assert an essential and important part of our culture, though, heaven knows, it is time we did: it is so we can deal in goods in quantities that we all instinctively understand, and our children should be taught about them, too.

Yet there is a still more telling consideration. If our masters have decided they don't care how we sell milk, why should they care what it says in our passports?

And now for a lesson that many of our politicians need to take on board:

Whatever they believe caused it, the Conservatives are in their 11th year in opposition because of John Major's treachery at Maastricht and his dishonourable behaviour after our eviction from the ERM on Black Wednesday.

The anger Europe stirs up reminds us why Mr Brown wants to avoid a referendum on the new EU treaty, a document unacceptable to this supposedly free and democratic nation.

It should also, though, remind him why he should have one, to get the issue out of the way so he can get on with being Prime Minister. If I were in his shoes I wouldn't hang around, either.

Many more of these "pointless" interferences in our way of life, and much more evidence of our impotence at the hands of the international unelect, and it won't be a referendum on the treaty that we will be calling for. It will be one on whether we want to stay in this oppressive and unsavoury club at all.

**Maybe the EU might if we keep speaking out, even allow the right for non moslems to demonstrate?

Tags: Simon Heffer, EU,

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