ninme

The Times - Shabby victory for the top-downers
Thunderer: History will have a word for what the British Government did in Lisbon today: perfidy, by Rosemary Righter

“History will remember this day as a day when new paths of hope were opened to the European ideal.” Thus spoke José Sócrates, the Prime Minister of Portugal, at the signing ceremony of the European treaty that dares not speak its true name.

Pass the hemlock. And the sick bag. The “European ideal” consists, it is now evident, of imposing on voters far-reaching changes to the way they are to be governed, without allowing them a look-in, or a voice. The “path of hope” beckons only to Europe’s most messianic federalists: it consists of a treaty clause that says that governments may in future cede powers to Brussels without consulting their parliaments, let alone their cussed voters.

History will indeed have a word for this: perfidy. Every single one of the 27 signatories of the Lisbon treaty is guilty of a breach of the democratic compact, monumental in its arrogance. Every one of them knows that, shorn of a few preambular paragraphs, chopped up and reassembled in a deliberately unreadable jumble of “amendments”, it resurrects the EU constitution rejected by French and Dutch voters.

Funny, isn’t it. Socrates was all about bringing realizations of moral concepts by asking questions of his students.

Update:

I was going to put this in a new entry, but upon reflection, I think it has a place here, in a post about the EU:

The Times - Sweet Wars
The proof of the pudding is in the eating, not the nationalist nomenclature

The official designation of Turkish delight is now Greek. A confectioner on Cyprus has stolen a marchpain by registering its Greek name of loukoumi under the European Union trademark protection Act. This subverts the legend and etymology of the sweet, which are lost in the kitchens of the 17th century.

There is no necessary connection between a national designation and the food attributed to it. Scots do not like Scotch eggs. They were invented for English picnics by a London grocer. The English don’t have English muffins. Welsh rabbit is an insult. The mis-spelling “rarebit” is later etymological pomposity. The French do not have French toast — their pain perdu is a different kettle of fish. Danish pastries come from Vienna, and may well be derived from Turkish baklava. And the Greeks claim that Turkish coffee was a misappropriation of the hot, sweet, sedimentary Greek coffee under the Ottomans.

A rosewater sweet by any other name would taste as sweet. But when biting into Cypriot or Turkish delight, beware of breaking a tooth on the political nuts concealed beneath the sugar.