Traditional Unionist leader takes his message to London
06 April 2009
ULSTER QC and Member of the European Parliament Jim Allister was speaking to London heartland Conservative and Unionist thinkers on Friday - warning of the dangers of loss of UK law-making sovereignty.
And the threat from Republican terrorists who have returned to murder and who had carried out Ulster's single worst atrocity in Omagh must be tackled head on, he said.
On Europe, Mr Allister said that becoming more enmeshed into the rapidly growing EU posed a serious danger to the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.
Addressing the strongly Eurosceptic Swinton Circle in London Mr Allister's theme was the Lisbon Treaty and the state of government in Northern Ireland.
He said everything must be done to prevent the terrorists of the IRA, under whatever flag of convenience, from achieving their aim of imposing Irish unification.
Mr Allister said although Sinn Fein's Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness may tactically proclaim their support of law and order, this remained limited to 'civic policing' and they still had the same aim as the so called dissidents, getting the British out of Ireland.
Danny Morrison's Armalite in the one hand and ballot box in the other philsophy had produced the present DUP/Sinn Fein regime and he had no doubt the Provos' terror successors drew comfort from the rewarding of violence which elevated Sinn Fein to the top of government.
Mr Allister told the Swinton Circle meeting in London that the Lisbon Treaty would move the UK irreversibly further down the road of a federal Europe, proclaiming the primacy of EU law, gaining for the EU a single legal personality in international law.
It could destroy the UK as we know it today, warned Mr Allister. And the result would be a dictatorship not democracy -- destroying the very reasons why some say the EU was created, after the horrors of dictatorships seen during World War Two.
He told the group: "It converts from "the European Community" to "The Union", a combination of citizens, rather than member states, thereby advancing European citizenship, and in consequence bestows on the EU the apparatus of statehood with its own President, de facto Foreign Minister, Foreign Service, embryonic European Army and its own binding Charter of Fundamental Rights."
Mr Allister warned: "It greatly expands centralised control through diminishing further national vetoes, by making a new tranche of powers (including justice and home affairs) exercisable by qualified majority, so that a dissenting member state can have policies it rejects foisted upon it. This is not democracy, this is dictatorship."
On Northern Ireland, Mr Allister made the point that he represents the only region in all of the EU - indeed in all the western democratic world - where, by law, you are forbidden to vote a Party out of Government, or to have an Official Opposition, courtesy of the mandatory coalition system of the Belfast Agreement.
This was a disgrace in any democracy, but within an integral part of the UK it was intolerable. His greatest sadness was that it was facilitated and operated by Unionists who once properly railed against it as an affront to every democratic precept and who at the last Westminster election won on a manifesto that said mandatory coalition was "out of the question". Yet, today, for the sake of office, they happily sit in government with IRA/Sinn Fein, not knowing or caring how many members of the IRA Army Council they share the cabinet table with.
"Yes", said Mr Allister, "Unionists, with good reason lambast successive British Governments for their accommodating weakness towards Irish republicanism, but today's presence of terrorists in government was self-inflicted by those who made careers out of deriding others, like David Trimble, for weakness."
"The upcoming European Election", said Mr Allister, "would be a welcome opportunity for Unionist voters to express their verdict on terrorist-inclusive government and those who put them there."
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