EU Parliament: As Real as Findus Beef Lasagne [BLOG]

The self-serving fraudsters, who gave birth to what has become the European Union, could teach Findus and other food processors caught up in the horsemeat for beef scandal a thing or two about misrepresenting products by their labels. Take the European parliament, for example.

Centuries of bloodshed, torture, tyrants and oppression have slowly but surely taught we Europeans that a better way was possible. This gentler way of life became known as democracy. It delivered among other benefits, individual rights to choose and check our own governments and to own our property. We came to depend on the protection of these most valuable of civilisation's assets through institutions and buildings which became known as parliaments.

Thus, it must have been that when the founders of what has become the European Union wished to destroy such individual freedoms and rights, in the name of progressive collectivism - an essential prerequisite for establishing a pan-European tyranny - they had to fabricate a powerless imitation of parliament that effectively aped, but did not carry, parliamentary powers. It corrupted the members elected to its worthless structures, ultimately ensuring that power forever remained within the elitist and self-reappointing institutions that controlled political affairs.

The European parliament was thus born, where legislation could not even be put forward for debate. Rules and regulations entirely emanated from the EU Commission. If parliament tried to amend the commission's legislative proposals, the commission could remove the detail from further consideration altogether. No wonder that the MEPs we see today are as far from democracy as any parliamentarians could get.

Criticism down the years from bloggers and commentators has slowly brought forward changes, such as the Lisbon Treaty, which boasts that parliament now enjoys joint decision-making with the council - still, of course, acting on legislature mostly drawn up by the appointed commission.

An earlier version better illustrates the real power of the commission.

We have witnessed the end result of the corrupting force that the European parliament exerts over the pretend parliamentarians called MEPs. One political group, supposedly opposed to all that the EU represents, is known as "Europe of Freedom and Democracy", of which Nigel Farage, MEP for SE England, is probably the best known member as head of the UK Independence Party. In this role he has for years been living high on the hog in Brussels, while apparently cleverly avoiding any chance of putting into practice what he loudly and frequently claims is his main aim - British withdrawal from the EU.

No doubt assuming that the Eastleigh by-election to replace Liberal Democrat Chris Huhne, who suddenly pleaded guilty to perverting the course of justice, would be called in May, Farage announced he would not run, being both preoccupied with important matters in the EU and busy on preparations for May's local council elections. When the Liberal Democrats instead called the vote for the earliest possible moment of 28 February, Farage was left looking more than slightly silly.

Worse was to come as it became widely known that another fantastic electoral gift was coming the way of any anti-EU party when it appeared that the constituency had only recently been robbed of a mass of car-worker jobs in a Ford Transit Van factory. Such enforced redundancies resulted largely from an EU loan, agreed by the Conservative chancellor, with jobs going outside the EU to Turkey. This fact was made much of by Farage on a visit to the Eastleigh constituency.

This, combined with successful by-election results for Ukip and a surge in the national opinion polls, made the prime minister concede an in/out referendum for Britain, as demanded for years by Farage and Ukip. It is impossible to imagine an electoral backdrop more beneficial to the lifelong causes and objectives he supposedly avows.

Nothing could have been more auspicious for a triumphal and almost guaranteed passage to Westminster, and thereafter national electoral success, making an Article 50 withdrawal notice by the UK to the EU a real and attainable medium-term objective, alongside a parliamentary repeal of the increasingly widely loathed European Communities Act.

Those who know the perks of office provided to the so-called "presidents" of the political party groupings in Brussels will not be surprised to learn this was the last course of action that one such as Farage would now probably choose.

Hopefully, Ukip party members will now perceive how they have been duped down the years. The candidate chosen to run for Ukip is a private health professional (a calling widely loathed in a nation enthralled by the NHS), unknown within the party, who seems ideal only if the objective is to ensure her non-election.

The complete sham that is EU democracy will thus roll along for a few more years, bringing further austerity, corruption and despair for all its ordinary co-opted citizens.

The Westminster parliament will continue to be entirely dominated by the pro-EU three main parties, while two-thirds of the people in the country believe that the time has come for our lost power and democracy to be restored. Joining Ukip, as has been the case for so many years, will merely cement the EU in power.

So it continues... horsemeat masquerading as beef, parliaments which are only talking shops, wolves dressed in sheep's clothing, and lies becoming the real common currency of our Europe.

Martin Cole runs several politically themed blogs, mainly Ironies Too, and tweets and comments about the erosion of liberty