Defending British Sovereignty, Rejecting the Lisbon Treaty
13 May 2009
Northern Ireland as part of the UK is in danger of losing its national sovereignty because of a haemorrhaging of powers to Brussels, Traditional Unionist Voice Party Leader Jim Allister MEP and QC warned today.
Mr Allister, in one of his key messages to voters in the European Parliament election taking place on June 4, said: “The major constitutional debate which is raging in the EU is important for us all. The lines are sharply drawn between those determined to build a centralised super-state and those committed to the defence of national sovereignty.
“I have fought tenaciously against the increasing centralisation of Europe, opposing both the EU Constitution and its twin, the Lisbon Treaty.
“But one of the key issues in the EU,” said Mr Allister, “was upholding UK law for all UK citizens”.
“Believing passionately in the primacy of the rights of member states, I have been at the forefront among MEPs in opposing the haemorrhaging of national powers to Brussels.
Mr Allister said: “The Lisbon Treaty moves us irreversibly further down the road to a federal Europe, proclaiming the primacy of EU law and gaining for the EU single legal personality in international law.
“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: its own President, de facto Foreign Minister, Foreign Service, embryonic European Army and its own binding Charter of Fundamental Rights.
“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.”
And in a message to voters Mr Allister said: “With the British Government having broken its pledge to allow a referendum on the EU Constitution, this election is your opportunity to have your say.
“You can reject the Lisbon Treaty best by voting number one for me as the Treaty’s most strident Ulster MEP critic. Some others say they oppose Lisbon, but strangely three of the DUP's MPs failed to vote for a referendum in the House of Commons on 5th March 2008.”
Jim Allister’s own on-line legal guide to the Lisbon Treaty is online here.
