He was one of the longest serving members of the European Parliament,
having been elected to that body in the first direct elections in
1979. He was re-elected six times consecutively and was a member of
the conference of presidents for 17 years.  He was known throughout
Europe as a life-long campaigner for democracy and transparency in the
EU.

Jens-Peter Bonde was one of the founders of the Danish People’s
Movement and originally opposed EEC membership for Denmark.
Following Denmark’s Maastricht Treaty Referendum in 1993 he accepted
the fact of Denmark’s EU membership and founded the Danish June Movement to
campaign for more democracy and transparency in the EU and its
institutions.

He took part in all nine EU-related referendums in the Republic of
Ireland between 1972 and 2012 in broad support of the EU-critical side
and participated in many radio and TV debates on these occasions. He
was the author of over twenty books on EU topics and is probably best
known for his production of the ‘Reader-Friendly Edition of the EU
Treaties’, with its invaluable index (see http://www.EUabc.com),
which enables people  find their way around the complex EU treaties.

His many friends and admirers in Ireland, in Denmark and
internationally will mourn his passing.  His close friend Anthony
Coughlan said: “Jens-Peter Bonde’s death means that Denmark and Europe
have lost a great democrat and internationalist and Ireland has lost a
very good friend.”

Jens-Peter Bonde was the husband of Lisbeth Kirk, founder of EUObserver.

He  was an admirer of the work of Irish artist Robert Ballagh, who
painted three portraits of members of the Bonde family: one of Jens-Peter
himself, one of his wife Lisbet Kirk and one of Jens-Peter and his
four sons together.

(See www.EUobserver.com for confirmation)

It provides that EU rules regarding State aids and customs that were thought necessary in Northern Ireland to ensure that there was no physical border between North and South could extend to the whole of the UK. This would keep Britain as a whole under the jurisdiction of EU law post-Brexit – the Irish tail continuing to wag the British dog – which is what the “Remainers”, and of course the EU, have always wanted.

An alternative and perfectly reasonable approach for after the UK has left the EU would be for the UK Parliament to pass a new law requiring all exports continuing to the EU to meet all EU requirements on pain of criminal sanctions. As only about 6% of UK business firms are involved in exports to the EU, the other 94% could be exempted from EU laws without that having any adverse effect on the EU.

After all, the previous need for EU/UK border checks was removed when the EU’s Single European Act came into force, which was only possible because the House of Commons had passed the European Communities (Amendment) Act 1986 to approve that treaty.

If the existing UK law provides a sufficient guarantee to the Irish and EU authorities that there is no need to check imports from the UK at the North-South Border, as it does, then there seems no good reason why a new UK law could not also provide such a guarantee.

This proposal was advanced by a high-powered group including former senior British Commission official Jonathan Faull in an August 2019 paper entitled “An Offer the UK and the EU cannot refuse“.

Unfortunately both did refuse it. It was also advocated by UUP politician Lord Empey. It has just been mooted by a Brexit-supporting correspondent, Dr Denis Cooper of Maidenhead, in a letter to the “Irish Times” which he has copied to me, with accompanying references reproduced for your information below.

Unsurprisingly, the “Irish Times” has not published this letter – at least not to date – for any constructive proposal that might advance a sensible Brexit is anathema to the Eurofederalist editorial group which runs that newspaper.

This proposal would seem to be particularly relevant in the context of a possible “No Deal” Brexit as meeting the valid concerns of both sides in that event.

The sheer hypocrisy of the EU side in this matter is breathtaking: a hard electronic border on the island of Ireland is a threat to the Good Friday Agreement, but a near identical tariff border down the Irish Sea is not, even though it terrifies Unionists and covers ten times as much trade. Remember: the Good Friday Agreement requires the consent of both sides!

The hysteria over the British Government’s statement that the will of the Westminster Parliament will override EU law in the UK post-Brexit reflects the dismay of “Remainer” interests that this prospect would disappear in the event of “No Deal” on a trade agreement. For the Brexit supporters are now creating their own “backstop”.

It is legal ABC that the unwritten Constitution of the UK is that the Crown in Parliament is sovereign and can therefore pass legislation that is in breach of any external treaty; and there are many precedents for that. The international law of treaties governs
relations between sovereign States. The EU does not claim to be a State, but an arrangement between States, so that any treaty with it does not have the status of a normal inter-State treaty. The UK Internal Market Bill does no more than assert this classical
British constitutional doctrine.

The probability still is that there will be an EU/UK trade agreement – in which case the current fuss will be irrelevant. The far bigger
danger for those who want to see the democratic majority vote of the 2016 UK referendum implemented by means of a real Brexit, is that British Big Business as represented by the CBI and other “Remainer” interests will still succeed in pressurising the British Government to sell out on fisheries, State aids and all sorts of other matters when it come to an EU/UK trade agreement between now and the end of the year.

It is far better for British democracy – and ultimately for both parts of Ireland too – that the UK should leave the EU WITHOUT a special trade deal and continue trading with the EU on the same basis as the USA, Japan, Australia and the other 160 or so world States that are outside the EU and have no special sovereignty-compromising trade deals with the power-grabbing EU empire.

References and further reading

An Offer the EU and UK Cannot Refuse

• “An Offer the UK and the EU cannot refuse“, 22 August 2019
• “Brexit: Backstop plan by Sir Jonathan Faull dismissed by EU“, BBC, August 27 2019, https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-northern-ireland-49488844 “EU officials have poured cold water on alternative proposals for the Brexit backstop by a former British European Commission official. Sir Jonathan Faull had suggested the EU and UK could maintain their own customs and regulatory regimes while using their laws to protect each others’ markets . . .This would mean goods would not have to be checked at the frontier.” A similar proposal was also made by the UUP politician Lord Empey, and that was also rejected out of hand.
• “Brexit: UUP sets out Irish border backstop alternative plans“, BBC, 1 September 2019, https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-northern-ireland-49545492 “The plans would include the creation of a new criminal offence for knowingly transporting non-compliant goods through the UK to the EU … the UUP’s alternative proposals were similar to those put forward in August by former British European Commission official Sir Jonathan Faull … Sir Jonathan has suggested the EU and UK could maintain their own customs and regulatory regimes while using their laws to protect each others’ markets.”
• “Brexit: Remain in customs union and single market to solve border issue, Ireland’s European commissioner tells May”, 26 November 2017, https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/ireland-border-brexit-latest-theresa-may-customs-union-phil-hogan-northern-a8076271.html “Mr Phil Hogan, the EU’s agriculture commissioner, said Ireland would ‘play tough to the end’ over the border issue, and said it was a ‘very simple fact’ that ‘if the UK or Northern Ireland remained in the EU customs union, or better still the single market, there would be no border issue’.”
• “No. 10 has realised the Brexit Deal’s true horrors“, Sherelle Jacobs, Daily Telegraph, Wednesday 10 September 2020, https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2020/09/10/no-10-must-stand-firm-flouting-international-law-face-eu-expansionism/ “Most exasperating of all is the Tory failure to call out Ursula von der Leyen’s pompous Tweets invoking “pacta sunt servanda”(agreements must be kept). The EU frequently and shamelessly violates international law, not to defend its sovereignty but to extend its reach and neutralise threats.   The EU’s fishing activities in the waters of occupied Western Sahara have violated international law. The EU’s penchant for instructing member states to defy Security Council rulings that threaten its supremacy violates international law. So too its track record for sending migrants back to North Africa and Turkey. Who is really the rogue state, Britain or the EU empire?   And while they are at it, Brexiteers should call out Remainer posturing. Take former cabinet secretary Lord O’Donnell’s claim that the civil service’s top lawyer Jonathan Jones had spoken “truth to power” by way of his “honourable resignation” in protest against No 10. This is the same Lord O’Donnell who, as Whitehall chief in 2011, blocked the publication of documents the Chilcot inquiry said were crucial to its Iraq war probe. A war that, lest we forget, was a violation of international law.”

The hysteria over the British Government’s statement that the will of the Westminster Parliament will override EU law in the UK post-Brexit reflects the dismay of “Remainer” interests that this prospect would disappear in the event of “No Deal” on a trade agreement.

The EU/UK Withdrawal Agreement and its Northern Ireland Protocol were drawn up by Boris Johnson’s predecessor Theresa May under pressure from the euro-unionists of the Confederation of British Industry (CBI) and other “Remainers”.

It provides that EU rules regarding State aids and customs that were thought necessary in Northern Ireland to ensure that there was no physical border between North and South should extend to the whole of the UK.

This would keep Britain as a whole under the jurisdiction of EU law post-Brexit – the Irish tail continuing to wag the British dog – which is what the “Remainers”, and of course the EU, have always wanted.

It is legal ABC that the unwritten Constitution of the UK is that the Crown in Parliament is sovereign and can therefore pass legislation that is in breach of any external treaty, and there are many precedents for that.

The international law of treaties governs relations between sovereign States. The EU does not claim to be a State, but an arrangement between States, so that any treaty with it does not have the status of a normal inter-State treaty.

The UK Internal Market Bill does no more than assert this classical British constitutional doctrine. The probability still is that there will be an EU/UK trade agreement – in which case the current fuss will be irrelevant.

The far bigger danger for those who want to see the democratic majority vote of the 2016 UK referendum implemented by means of a real Brexit, is that British Big Business as represented by the CBI and other “Remainer” interests will still succeed in pressurising the British Government to sell out on fisheries, State aids and all sorts of other matters when it come to an EU/UK trade agreement between now and the end of the year.

It is far better for British democracy – and ultimately for both parts of Ireland too – that the UK should leave the EU without a special trade deal and continue trading with the EU on the same basis as the USA, Japan, Australia and the other 160 or so world States that are outside the EU and have no special sovereignty-compromising trade deals with the power-grabbing EU empire.

The Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties defines treaties as agreements between states. But the EU is not a state, it is an international organisation. So, the Withdrawal Agreement does not have the status of a treaty. The EU is not a party to the Vienna Convention, so it can hardly invoke its provisions.

https://legal.un.org/ilc/texts/instruments/english/conventions/1_1_1969.pdf

(See House of Commons Library, Could the Withdrawal Agreement be
terminated under international law? 19 March 2019.)

It is legitimate to terminate a treaty if the terms of the treaty become injurious to a state:

if by such treaty either wholly or partly the terms of treaty become injurious to one of the parties, thereby adversely affecting the interest of that state. In such circumstances, there is conflict as to the sovereignty of the state, whereby
sovereignty of that state is in danger. Its survival is more important than such obligations. In such cases of conflict, the law makes it very clear that any contractual obligation comes to an end.

See SRD Law Notes on Termination of Treaties.

The best known of these is the redoubtable German-born Mrs Gisela Stuart, former MP for Birmingham Edgbaston, who was Tony Blair’s nominee to the EU Convention that drew up the Treaty Establishing a Constitution for Europe in 2003.

This was the EU Constitutional Treaty that was rejected by French and Dutch voters in referendums in 2005 and was then repackaged virtually unchanged in the form of amendments to the existing EU treaties as the Treaty of Lisbon – a ploy which ensured that most people were prevented from appreciating its profound constitutional significance.

The Treaty of Lisbon abolished the European Community, which had been the repository of supranational European laws from 1957 until 2009, and transferred its powers to a constitutionally new European Union, to which it gave explicit legal personality for the first time. It put foreign policy and crime and justice policy on the supranational EU level for the first time also.

It then gave us all an additional EU citizenship – “additional” being the term used in the Treaty – so that instead of being citizens of a unitary Irish State, we were all made citizens of a new Federal European Union.

Just as in such classical Federal States as the USA and Germany, where people are citizens of New York and California, of Bavaria and Brandenburg, as well as of the Federal USA or Germany, so it is now for all of us in the EU – in that we all have two citizenships, being Federal EU citizens as well as Irish National ones.

In the post-Lisbon EU, State sovereignty is divided, as in all classical Federal States, between the Federal level of Brussels and the national Member State level, and everyone is a citizen of each level, with the associated rights and duties of citizenship attaching to the two levels. The prime duty of a citizen is of course to obey the laws of the State one is a citizen of.

The rights and duties attaching to EU citizenship override the rights and duties attaching to Irish citizenship in any case of conflict between the two because of the primacy of EU law – a principle which the Lisbon treaty makes explicit for the first time also. One can only be a citizen of a state and all states consist of citizens. Lisbon also gave the post-Lisbon european union the power to impose its own taxes. And it gave it the power to decide our human rights.

This EU Constitution was then pushed through without referendums in every EU country except Ireland. When Irish voters voted No to Lisbon in 2008, they were made vote on it a second time to push it through unchanged in 2009.

Ireland’s statutory Referendum Commission, chaired by then High Court Justice Mr Frank Clarke, now Chief Justice, whose job it was to tell citizen voters what the Lisbon treaty referendum was about, quite failed to inform us of the constitutional revolution this treaty was making in our lives.

Having objected to being British citizens for generations, we were now being made EU citizens by stealth! This is surely a long way from “the unfettered control of Irish destinies” that was aspired to in the 1916 Proclamation.

Gisela Stuart MP was so disillusioned by the contempt for democracy shown by the Eurounionists whom she encountered during this saga that she wrote a Fabian Society pamphlet exposing how the EU obtained its Federal Constitution, and how it turned us all into real EU citizens for the first time also, with all the implications of that.

She went on to become the Labour joint-chairman of the official “Vote Leave” campaign in the 2016 UK Brexit referendum – her Conservative fellow chairman being Michael Gove MP.

The second Brexiteer Labour MP to be elevated to the House of Lords was Mr Frank Field, former MP for Birkenhead, where he was friends with the Irish labour historian the late C.Desmond Greaves (1913-1988), who lived and is buried in that constituency; and the third was Mrs Kate Hoey, former MP for Vauxhall, London.

You may care to note that the CIB web-site, www.CampaignforanIndependentBritain.org.uk, has much interesting material on the current state-of-play re Brexit. It gives information on the recently published 330-page book on “Ireland and the EU Post Brexit” by former Irish diplomat Dr Ray Bassett, as well as a video of a lecture that Dr Bassett gave at last year’s CIB annual conference criticising Irish Government policy on Brexit during the Theresa May regime as being effectively subversive of the Good Friday Agreement.

Dr Bassett’s revealing book is now available from YPS Publishing at www.yps-publishing.co.uk Its ISBN number is 978-1-8380397-0-7 if one is ordering it through bookshops.

The CIB committee has unanimously resolved to award honorary life membership to Professor Anthony Coughlan of Trinity College Dublin, in appreciation of more than fifty years of support for the cause of British independence from the EU. Prof. Coughlan‘s writings as both a professional economist and an authority on the threat of European integration to national sovereignty have for decades been invaluable to EU-critical lawyers, economists and political activists.

A regular contributor to this website, he has recently retired as director of the Irish National Platform EU Research and Information Centre to concentrate on his work as literary executor of the historian C. Desmond Greaves (1913-1988).

Prof. Coughlan has been opposed to supranational EU integration on democratic and internationalist grounds all his adult life. His first political action when he became a lecturer in social policy at Trinity College Dublin in the early Sixties was to organise a collective letter criticising Ireland’s (first) application to join the then EEC along with the UK. This was carried in the Irish Times on 12 February 1962.

Twice during the 1960s French President Charles de Gaulle vetoed the UK’s application to join the EEC. It was only after De Gaulle’s resignation in 1969 that the UK’s membership application was revived, and Ireland’s and Denmark’s along with it.

Ireland has held no fewer than nine EU-related constitutional referendums between 1972 and 2012 – and Coughlan was actively involved in all of them, opposing European integration on each occasion. These were the 1972 EEC Accession Treaty referendum, the 1987 Single European Act referendum, the 1992 Maastricht Treaty on European Union referendum, the 1998 Amsterdam Treaty referendum, the 2001 and 2002 referendums on the Treaty of Nice, the 2008 and 2009 referendums on the Treaty of Lisbon / EU Constitution, and the 2012 Fiscal Compact referendum.

In 1975 he was invited to speak on behalf of the ‘No’ side in the UK’s first ever referendum – that held by Harold Wilson’s Labour Government on whether the UK’s should remain in the then EEC. He shared platforms at ‘No’ meetings with the Labour Party’s Tony Benn and Peter Shore, and with Conservative Sir Richard Body, who was of course a long-serving co-president of CIB. In the 1990s he attended several conferences of the European Research Group (ERG), and has been friends for decades with Bill (Sir William) Cash MP, chairman of the House of Commons’ EU Scrutiny Committee and veteran Brexiteer.

Prof. Coughlan was also closely involved in numerous constitutional actions before the Irish High Court and Supreme Court on the implications of EU integration, including seeking to establish fair procedures in constitutional referendums. These included the 1987 Crotty case, the 1995 McKenna case, the 2000 Coughlan case and the 2012 Pringle case. Coughlan himself was the plaintiff in the third of these cases, in which the Supreme Court laid down that there should be broadly equal free broadcasting time between both sides in Irish referendums if they were to be fairly and democratically conducted.

Such were the strength of Prof. Coughlan’s eurosceptic arguments that the Irish government even changed the law to prevent voters accessing them. Ireland’s statutory Referendum Commission used to have the function of setting out the pros and cons of referendum propositions. In the 2001 referendum on the Nice Treaty, the Commission produced a booklet that was posted to all households in the Republic, setting out the arguments for and against ratifying the Nice Treaty. The booklet included contact details for Coughlan as chairman of the National Platform, and for Alan Dukes as chairman of the European Movement-Ireland, as two reputable organisations where voters could access further information on the two sides’ arguments.

But when Irish citizens voted ‘No’ to ratifying Nice, the government amended the Referendum Act to take away from the Referendum Commission this function of setting out the pros and cons of referendum propositions. They then held a second referendum on the Nice Treaty in 2002, to undo the ‘No’ vote of the first and enable them to push through the treaty unchanged.

Prof. Coughlan was a lifelong antagonist of Irish political leader Dr Garret FitzGerald, an ardent euro-federalist and one of the founders of the European Movement in Ireland. The two debated each other fiercely during Ireland’s 1972 referendum on EEC Accession, and on numerous occasions thereafter. Dr FitzGerald became Minister for Foreign Affairs soon after Ireland joined the EEC in 1973, and served as Taoiseach for most of the 1980s. He remained a dedicated champion of supranational euro-federalism throughout his political career. A year or two before he died in 2011, Dr FitzGerald met his erstwhile antagonist at a public lecture in Trinity College Dublin. On greeting him, the former Taoiseach wagged his finger facetiously and remarked, ‘You are the enemy!’

We can think of no greater accolade than to be regarded as ‘the enemy’ by one’s country’s euro-enthusiast political elite. We thank Prof. Coughlan for his tireless work for the independence cause in both Ireland and the UK, and wish him every success in his new project.

The portrait of Prof. Coughlan illustrating this piece is by the renowned Irish portrait artist Robert Ballagh, and is reproduced here with the artist’s kind permission. Ballagh designed the final series of Irish banknotes before the country adopted the euro. His portrait of scientist Francis Crick – who was the joint discoverer of the DNA’s double helix with James Watson – was unveiled by the Queen at the opening of new Crick Institute in King’s Cross last year.

“Phoenix” magazine refuses to correct misrepresentation of British EU-critics

The Campaign for an Independent Britain (CIB) is the longest-established network of EU-critics and EU-opponents in Britain, with a wide range of organisations on the political Centre, Right and Left affiliated to it. It played an important part in the 2016 UK Brexit referendum.

In June the CIB Committee unanimously invited me to accept honorary life membership of the Campaign in recognition of my work for the EU-critical cause in Britain, Ireland and internationally over many years. I was honoured to accept, as I have interacted with the CIB and its affiliates since it was founded in 1969 and have admired its work for national and international democracy over that time.

Dr Anna Bailey, CIB administrator, put the committee’s Citation on its web-site and I drew it to the attention of a wide range of media and opinion formers in Ireland, including all members of the Oireachtas and the Northern Ireland Assembly (See the website www.CampaignforanIndependentBritain.org.uk for this Citation).

I assumed that informed, politically interested people in Ireland would be well aware that the CIB was a broad alliance of non-party, Conservative-oriented and Labour-oriented organisations in the UK that were united in common opposition to the EU’s long-standing assault on national democracy and independence, although I did not spell that out.

In its issue of 3 July “Phoenix Magazine” carried an item under the headline “Coughlan’s Pals” which stated that the CIB was a group of “assorted Tories, Little Englanders and hard-line unionists”, and highlighted what the writer of the item regarded as sundry past political peccadilloes by some of the CIB’s wide list of patrons.

This was a blatant misrepresentation of the character of the Campaign for an Independent Britain. In making it “Phoenix” was aligning itself with those interests in Ireland and across the EU that seek to misrepresent the advocates of Brexit as rednecks, racists and reactionaries rather than campaigners for a fundamentally progressive cause – that cause being to re-establish democracy and political independence in our next-door-neighbour State, a cause that was supported by voters in the majority of Labour-held constituencies in Britain in the 2016 referendum and by people who were politically Left, Right and Centre on that occasion.

The Campaign for an Independent Britain was founded over 50 years ago by the “Labour Euro-Safeguards Campaign” amongst others, and that Labour Party-oriented body, led by well-known economist and millionaire Labour donor John Mills, is still affiliated to it.

Another of the CIB’s current affiliates is “Labour Leave“, which played a significant role in organising Labour-oriented Brexiteers in the Brexit referendum. British Labour people have always been to the fore in the CIB, the best known perhaps being former Labour Minister Peter Shore, who was a key person in the CIB in its early decades.

The “Phoenix” item went on to make a sneering reference to Mr Edward Spalton, current CIB chairman, as having been “a former UKIP EU election candidate”. If one googles the internet entries from which this piece of shock-horror news was dredged, one finds that while Mr Spalton did stand for UKIP in the EU Parliament election in 1999, he stood for election to the House of Commons for a different party six years later, and today he is an independent person with no party affiliations.

With some further, less biased, research-digging the writer of this “Phoenix” item might have discovered that Mr Spalton’s predecessor as CIB Chairman for over twenty years was Labour MP David Stoddart, who is now a Labour peer as Lord Stoddart of Swindon and is on the CIB’s current list of patrons. I wrote to Mr Paddy Prendiville, editor of “Phoenix”, whom I know, asking him to correct this obvious misrepresentation of this British democratic network, saying that if he did not do so I would have to try and correct it myself. He declined to oblige. Hence this statement, which I am posting and e-mailing to broadly the same media, political people and opinion-formers as originally received the CIB citation referred to.

I am confident that the previous owner of “Phoenix”, the late John Mulcahy, would not have let such a clear misrepresentation of a progressive network of organisations like the Campaign for an Independent Britain go uncorrected – if he had countenanced the original item being published in the first place. But there you are.

• Not another day under the EU thumb, Will Podmore, 16 April 2020, CPBML https://www.cpbml.org.uk/news/not-another-day-under-eu-thumb

• The EU’s new coronavirus relief deal is a gift to Europe’s enemies, Yanis Varoufakis, The Guardian, 11 Apr 2020 https://www.theguardian.com/world/commentisfree/2020/apr/11/eu-coronavirus-relief-deal-enemies-debt-eurozone “Ignore the headlines about €500bn to rescue Europe. Refusing to share debt across the eurozone threatens the union’s future”

• The coronavirus crisis has exposed the truth about the EU: it’s not a real union, Simon Jenkins, The Guardian, 10 April 2020 https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/apr/10/coronavirus-crisis-truth-eu-union-financial-rescue

• With idealism lost, has the euro become Europe’s purgatory? Eoin Drea, The Irish Times, 29 April 2020 https://www.irishtimes.com/opinion/with-idealism-lost-has-the-euro-become-europe-s-purgatory-1.4240168 This was written by Mr Eoin Drea, whom the paper informs us “is a researcher at the Wilfried Martins Centre, the official think tank of the European People’s Party, which includes Fine Gael”. This article is an implicit criticism of the folly of the Euro-currency
  project, which is all the  more surprising coming from such a source. My first thought on reading it was to ask how did such an article get by the editorial censors  at the “Irish Times”. These normally
  suppress all hints of EU-criticism. Did nobody think of asking Fine Gael about it? A second thought was that maybe glimpes of reality are at last starting to break through the fog of europhilia that normally hangs over Tara Street. A third was that Fianna Fail and Fine Gael have stated that a key
  policy objective of the next Government is that we must stay “at the heart of Europe”. But if being at the heart of Europe amounts to Purgatory today, would not going closer in, as these big parties clearly want to do, amount to entering Hell tomorrow? Not to mind the political wickedness of Dublin politicians adding new dimensions to Partition, now that the North is leaving the EU along with the rest of the UK. Mr Drea quotes former EU Commission President Romano Prodi as saying: “The success of the euro tells us that there is a demand for a strong and united Europe.”  He   writes:” Prodi’s comments also highlighted the political origins of the single currency. Its economic rationale was always debatable.” My own favourite Prodi quote is another remark that he made at the time of the euro’s launch: “The two pillars of the Nation State are the sword and the currency, and we have changed that.” A key point that people need to grasp about currencies is this: If a country has its own currency it can never go bankrupt or be insolvent, for it can always print as much money as it needs and pay its debts in its national currency, which is the only legal tender that its citizens can use. If a country uses a foreign currency, however, which is what we effectively do as users of the euro,  it must pay its debts and finance its deficits in that foreign currency, and its foreign lenders can always pull the plug on it. That is why all independent States have their own currencies, and
  there are over 150 national currencies in the world. Having abolished its national currency to join the Eurozone, Ireland is now of course no longer independent; despite many who must know better pretending that the State has kept its sovereignty. [AC]

• Who will salute Trump’s man in Berlin? The President finally picks the right man for a job — yet Washington won’t have it, Marshall Auerback & James Carden, Unherd, 12 August 2020 https://unherd.com/2020/08/how-trumps-new-hire-subverts-the-status-quo/ “Marshall Auerback is a market commentator and a research associate for the
  Levy Institute at Bard College. James Carden is a contributing writer for foreign affairs at The Nation. He served as a policy adviser to the Special Representative for Intergovernmental Affairs and the Office of Russia Affairs at the US State Department.”

Read an extract here.

I think that it is in the interest of every patriotic, nationally-minded and progressive person to do what they can to draw attention to this important work and to urge people to buy it, preferably direct from the Distributors, as that is the easiest and speediest way of getting it, paying by credit card online at £12.50 a copy, plus postage. It should retail in the local bookshops here at €15 in due
course, but please do what you can to generate interest in and encourage sales of this book.

Dr Bassett’s revealing book is now available from YPS Publishing at www.yps-publishing.co.uk Its ISBN number is 978-1-8380397-0-7 if one is ordering it through bookshops.

Video: Dr Ray Bassett on the Irish Backstop, 2019

CHAPTER  HEADINGS

1. Introduction: The Last Refuge of Scoundrels
2. The Irish Bailout
3. The British Irish Relationship Post-Brexit
4. Northern Ireland and the Peace Process
5. History of the Irish State’s Attitude to European Integration
6. Ireland’s Changing Position in the EU
7. Ireland’s Business Model and Irexit
8. Ireland and the Euro
9. The Democratic Deficit
10. Ireland and Ever-Closer Union
11. The EU Propaganda Machine in Ireland
12. The Anglophone World and Ireland’s Diaspora
13. Alternative Policy Options Open to the Irish Government
14. Conclusion
15. Epilogue
Annexes 1-3
Bibliography
Name Index

ENDORSEMENTS ON THE BOOK’S BACK COVER

In the parlance of the Anglo-Irish desk at the Department of Foreign
Affairs an Ambassadorship is described as the Red Hat and is regarded as one of the highest offices available. I was informed by a Taoiseach that Ray Bassett had turned down several offers of the Red Hat because he wanted to stick with the Northern situation. He was also one of the key figures in the brilliant Irish diplomatic team that did so much to bring about the Good Friday Agreement; only after it concluded did he accept the Ambassadorship to Canada. Bassett then can be taken as a man with insights into the higher reaches of Irish Government policy.

One may not agree with the conclusions of his vision but one is
inevitably reminded of Voltaire’s dictum that although one disagreed
with someone’s opinion one should defend his right to hold it to the
death. Provocative and stimulating are two words that occur when assessing Ray Bassett’s work and one should read this book to find out why.

– TIM PAT COOGAN is Ireland’s best-known historical writer

A distinguished former diplomat, who cares deeply about his country, Bassett has been widely criticised by the Irish Establishment for daring to air uncomfortable truths about Dublin’s response to the UK’s Brexit vote. This caused him personal distress. Yet he has continued regardless, speaking out against ”rising Anglophobia” in Ireland, while imploring politicians on both sides of the Irish Sea to get beyond the  poor and short-term decision making that has characterised our collective history.  For that he deserves deep gratitude and respect  – not just in the Republic of Ireland but among citizens of its nearest neighbour too.

– LIAM HALLIGAN, economist, author, broadcaster and award-winning British journalist

Bassett’s ‘Ireland and the EU Post-Brexit’ fills a remarkable gap in
the literature on Ireland, its relationship with both the European Union and Great Britain and – not least – the implications of Brexit.
This book should be required reading for any intellectually honest and
informed discussion of future relationships, consequential policy
alternatives, and the possibilities surrounding conflict and peace in
the region and on the continent.

–     DR BONNIE WEIR, Lecturer in Political Science, Yale University

Here’s a fact worth repeating ad infinitum: In this country the bank
bailout hit us at 25% of our GDP; Germany 1.5%.  Yet our media and political Establishment have never really hit a discordant note whilst signing the praises of Brussels. Is there some sort of collective myopia or amnesia at work here?  Bassett seems to have been absent from that particular singing session. Thank God!

–      PAT McART, author and former managing editor of the “Derry Journal”

Letters’ page discussion, Irish News

Monday 24 August :

It is ludicrous of Seán McCann to call Ray Bassett a “de facto unionist” and “technically Irish” (August 18)  because he does not like the content of his recently published book “Ireland and the EU Post Brexit“.

In truth, it is Mr McCann who is the unionist as he believes Ireland should  be part of the European Union and be controlled from Brussels via Berlin and Frankfurt.

Ray Bassett shows in his very readable and accessible book how control is maintained over many aspects of the Irish state from running of the economy to foreign policy and militarisation. Indeed, his chapter on
the Irish economic crisis and the negative role played by the EU is
perhaps the most lucid and concise writing I have read on the subject.

His chapter on the Good Friday Agreement is also truly insightful. Ray
Bassett knows what he is talking about as he was intimatelyinvolved in
the Northern peace process as a senior civil servant  in the Irish
Department of Foreign Affairs and was indeed the key liaison person
with the IRA and Loyalist leaders over that time – something Mr McCann
failed to mention.

This book also documents how the Dublin Establishment did everything
possible to frustrate Brexit in the three years followingthe 2016 UK
referendum. Instead Dublin should have acted as a mediator between
Brussels and London to ensure that Britain got the best Brexit deal
possible, for that is in Ireland’s interest almost as much as it is in
Britain’s. Now that Brexit is clearly happening since the Johnson
Government got its majority last December, this is surely the best
course for us to adopt.

The post-Brexit debacle reminded me of how the EU bureaucrats despise
democracy and refused to accept the Republic’s referendum decisions to
reject both the Nice and Lisbon treaties.  I make no apology for being
anti-EU and having campaigned in the six counties for Brexit.

Does that make me a  unionist? I am simply adhering to the 1916
Proclamation: “We declare the right of the people of Ireland to the
ownership of Ireland and to the unfettered control of Irish destinies,
to be sovereign and indefeasible.” If you aspire to that then you have
to be opposed to the EU Empire.

Monday 14 September

Mr Sean MacCann ( September 4) writes that the Nation State is out-of-date, national sovereignty is a delusion and national parliaments are powerless these days because economies have become “supranational”. He thereby dismisses the possibility of democracy, because democracy  – where people  vote for representatives who make the laws and rules that govern them – is only possible at the level of the national community and the nation state. He shows himself thereby to be an apologist for Imperialism and
transnational big business, which want to be free from the controls
that can only be imposed by national states in the interest of the people and whose political instrument in our part of the world is the European Union.

How is Mr MacCann’s dismissal of the relevance of state sovereignty and national democracy reconcilable with the fact that the number of states in the world  – most of them national, some multinational  – has gone from some 60 in 1945 to nearly 200 today?

And many more new States will come into being as our century unfolds,
as new peoples around the world assert their right to national
self-determination and to decide their relations with other nations.

He writes that modern “economies are supranational”. But it is surely
quite mistaken to imply that national economies no longer exist and
that national  currencies, national laws, national parliaments and
national governments are no longer important in ensuring that those
economies and societies are run in the interests of their respective
peoples.

Internationalism implies cooperation between sovereign nation states,
in which people decide democratically the character and extent of that cooperation.

The supranationalism which Mr MacCann extols is one where national states are simply puppets of imperial powers.

There is a titanic struggle going on in today’s world between defenders of national independence and the nation state and the supranationalists who want to hollow out the nation state in the interests of transnational big business and high finance.

It is clear from what he writes that Mr MacCann, by  identifying with EU unionism, has chosen the anti-democratic  and reactionary side in this contest.  Hoping for a knee-jerk reaction he disingenuously argues that being anti-EU equates with being pro-British imperialism.

In contrast, Ray Bassett’s book “Ireland and the EU Post Brexit” reveals the true nature of the EU.

It leaves one in no doubt that James Connolly’s slogan “We serve neither King nor Kaiser but Ireland” is as relevant today as it was a century ago.

Niall Farrell
Oranmore, Co Galway

Brexit: Backstop plan by Sir Jonathan Faull dismissed by EU, BBC NI, 27 Aug 2019

https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-northern-ireland-49488844

“Under this proposal it will be a violation of UK law backed up by severe penalties knowingly to export, through the frontier between the North and the Republic, goods which do not comply with the regulatory standards of the EU.”

If the Irish Government does not like such a reasonable offer, then they could lump it and/or erect their own border control posts on behalf of the EU. Sales to the Irish Republic make up only 6 per cent of sales by businesses in Northern Ireland, and the goods exported across the land border comprise only 7 per cent of the GDP of the province, and probably involve a similar fraction of its businesses; and the goods carried across the Irish land border into EU territory constitute a mere 0.1 per cent of UK GDP.

Northern Ireland goods exports to the Republic in 2016 = £2.4 billion, not all of which were driven across the land border, compared to NI GVA of £34.4 billion = 7%, and compared to UK GVA of £1666 billion = 0.14%. So why has the UK government decided that numerous other businesses, not just in Northern Ireland but also in the rest of the UK, must be dragged into an ill-designed, cumbersome and expensive system to protect the EU Single Market, when the obvious solution is to apply any necessary restrictions just to those businesses that actually export across the border?

“Brussels playing games with Irish sea border” is the title of an important article by Northern Ireland journalist Newton Emerson in the Irish Times on Thursday, 4 June. In his article Mr Emerson points out that four-fifths of all grocery spending in Northern Ireland takes place in just three supermarket chains: Tesco, Sainsbury’s and Asda. Tesco and Asda have one distribution centre each in the region: Tesco in the Belfast Harbour Estate and Asda by the Port of Larne. Sainsbury’s model is even simpler, with one huge distribution centre in East Kilbride serving Scotand and Northern Ireland. So most imported goods roll off ferries to be sorted in one place, effectively on the quayside, before arriving in store straight from loading bay to ship.

The EU is making heavy weather over Irish sea border controls. As Newton Emerson says, the EU is continuing to use the Irish border as a bargaining chip. It is significant that Barnier felt obliged to respond to Emerson’s article the following Saturday (Irish Times, 6 June) as follows:

Regarding Mr Emerson’s concerns… I would say that we can take into account those concerns within the framework as it’s currently written because it’s written in a very precise way… Simplified declarations can be used for large economic operators, supermarkets being one of of them.

NB. The most important point in Newton Emerson’s article below is its last two sentences. In the light of these there can be no excuse for the new Government in Dublin not seeing that Barnier is bullying this State and this country. If the Dublin politicians want to let that happen, so be it. If border posts go up, the world won’t cave in. Violence won’t resume in the North and the technical solutions that Dublin has been saying were impossible will be quickly found to be possible. It will just mean that the South’s ultra-europhile politicians will be setting themselves up to be all the more discredited in the eyes of the public as things finally play out.

 The EU’s approach to Northern Ireland has been dangerously cynical from the outset. Whatever excuse there might still be for that, there is no longer any excuse for not seeing it.

https://www.irishtimes.com/opinion/newton-emerson-brussels-playing-games-with-irish-sea-border-1.4269775

The Committee of the Annual Desmond Greaves Summer School lecture on “Europe and the EU after Brexit” at 2 p.m. on Saturday 15 February, by Professor William Mitchell, co-author with Thomas Fazi of “Reclaiming the State: A Progressive Vision of Sovereignty for a Post- Neoliberal World”.

Co-hosted by the People’s Movement. In this internationally influential book the authors explore why the mainstream Labour movement and Left in the developed world ideologically disarmed itself in the 1970’s before a rampant neoliberalism.

The key neoliberal propositions which the mainstream Left bought into were that national sovereignty had become irrelevant in an increasingly complex and interdependent international economy and that globalisation had made individual States increasingly powerless in face of market forces.

Consequently the only hope of meaningful change was to “pool” State sovereignty and transfer it to supranational institutions such as the European Union, thereby regaining at supranational level the sovereignty that had been lost at the national level.

This represented an abandonment of the classical position of the Left as regards politics: namely, that the first duty of Labour Movement activists and lefwingers is to be the foremost champions of the fullest democracy.

This means that the Left in every EU Member State should stand for national independence and national democracy vis-à-vis the EU. This is “internationalism”, which is the supreme value of the authentic Left and is the opposite of “supranationalism”.

It is in fact the political value which Ireland’s James Connolly sought to advance when he took part in the 1916 Easter Rising with the aim of establishing an independent Irish Republic that, as he said, “would be a beacon-light to the oppressed of every land”.

Internationalism means standing for the right to self-determination of the different nations into which humanity is divided. In the European context this means working for the destruction of the EU.

The best way of bringing this about is to advocate that one’s own country or State should leave the EU and support other countries, or the political forces in other countries, that wish to leave it too. The defence of the democratic State against Transnational Capital and its related political interests which seek to undermine national independence and democracy is the principal ideological task before the Left in every European country today.

Bill Mitchell and Thomas Fazi are now working on a new book which extends and develops their “Reclaiming the State” analysis further.

Brexit will be a severe blow to the EU. It is a major historical event that the fifth largest economy in the world should leave what is in reality an aspiring Euro-federation.

The Left should not see Brexit and the current crisis of the EU and monetary union as a cause for despair, but rather as a unique opportunity to come to terms with the fact that the sovereign State, far from being helpless, still contains the resources for democratic control of a nation’s economy and finances: in other words that the struggle for national sovereignty is ultimately a struggle for democracy.

This need not come at the expense of European cooperation. On the contrary, by allowing governments to maximise the well-being of their citizens, it could and should provide the basis for a renewed European multilateral cooperation between sovereign States.

Kevin McCorry School Director GREAVES SCHOOL COMMITTEE: Owen Bennett, Mick Carty, Anthony Coughlan, Mary Crotty, Eddie Cowman, Karen Devine, Frank Keoghan, Patricia McKenna, Ruan O’Donnell, Cathal O’Murchú, Mick O’Reilly, Michael Quinn