Nigel Farage explains why he believes the European Union is the new Soviet Union

I want to make your flesh creep, to frighten and perplex you. I can see no other way to alert this country and its people to the approaching end of a thousand years of history.


We are about to be extinguished as an independent nation. We are about to lose the power to control our own destiny, to make and enforce our own laws.


The threat comes from a bundle of paper, from a tedious conference in that grey, foggy capital of dullness, Brussels. There, for some months, a special convention has been drawing up the European Union's new constitution. And that means they have been drawing up our constitution, since we will be bound by it.


The document, driven through by the autocratic French ex-President Valery Giscard d'Estaing, has a simple purpose. It turns the EU into a state.


Its core, Article 9, declares: 'The Constitution, and law adopted by Union institutions in exercising competences conferred on it by the Constitution, shall have primacy over the law of the member States.'


This means that, once it is in force, a centralised Europe will be the source of power, not the nations that make it up.


No doubt bits and pieces of it can be, and will be, modified at the conferences which will discuss it. Anthony Blair will engineer a fake confrontation in which he will 'win' the 'right' to keep command of our own Armed Forces and our own foreign policy for a few years.


But the other parts of the treaty will make all that meaningless. Because piece by piece and hour by hour the power to take important decisions will be packed up in boxes and shipped from Westminster and Whitehall to Brussels.


Our courts will have to defer to the European Supreme Court in Luxembourg. If European officials disagree with British Ministers, the Euromen will have the upper hand. The European Charter of Fundamental Rights, a document so vague that it offers no serious protection against repression, will be the basis of all legal decisions.


Parliament will no longer be able even to pretend to have the final say on anything.


At the same time, the police on the streets will begin to enforce European, rather than British, laws.


So will the courts. And those who break European laws will - especially if they travel to other EU countries - be open to prosecution even if the things they have done are not officially illegal in Britain.


A European Public Prosecutor will decide what goes to court. And since hardly any other EU country has jury trial, the presumption of innocence or habeas corpus, our courts will come under pressure to fall into line with theirs.


These are not small things. Nor are they disliked by everyone. Some will co-operate with this new order because it gives them things they have always wanted. Most of our liberty depends on the fact that the authorities cannot push us around, even if they want to.


Governments usually do want to shove people around, and officials and bureaucrats loathe the annoying restraints placed on them by what they see as silly and finicky documents such as the Magna Carta or the English Bill of Rights - both of which will be quietly strangled by the new Euro-Constitution.


The British Home Office longs to get rid of inconvenient juries. British chief constables would love to be running the centralised, powerful police forces of the Continent.



Our bureaucrats yearn for the security and freedom from accountability which their European counterparts enjoy.