THE HAND THAT ROCKS THE CRADLE

GREECE, ONE OFTEN HEARS, IS THE CRADLE of democracy. Of course, the democracy involved in the time of those clever chaps like Socrates, as described in I.F. Stone’s wonderful The Trial of Socrates or in The Greeks by H.D.F. Kitto, was not exactly a democracy as we know it today, in which important people who have managed to get themselves elected into power tell us what we should be doing despite the fact that they promised to do what we told them to do if we elected them.

THE ATHENIAN SYSTEM, in its primitive innocence, was based on referenda, an approach some may see as rather frightening, as giving the people the right to decide on issues that, after all, and let’s face it, they don’t really fully grasp, is tantamount to madness.

NOWHERE IS THIS DISDAIN for popular power more evident than in the European Union, where the mere mention of hated words such as “choice”, “vote”, “elections” and – heaven forbid! – “referendum” sends our unelected leader José Manuel Barroso, and Herman Von Rumpey-Pumpey, his idiot cohort at the head of the Union, into paroxysms of fear.

THUS WHEN George Papandreou, the now fed-up Prime Minister of Greece, decided to ask for a referendum on whether to accept the plan for salvation of Greece’s economy cobbled together over months of Eurocratic wrangling, lunches, dinners, late evening discussions in hotels, strolls around parks in Brussels, free admission to the opening of the new Tin-Tin movie on Sunday last, these people must have spluttered into their complementary cocktails.

INDEED, AS, FOR EUROPEAN EUROCRATS, this is the last straw. We have already seen the Republic of Ireland daring not to ratify the Treaty of Lisbon through a NO vote in a referendum, and they had to be sorted out by having the Irish Parliament overturning this lunacy after a major injection of money from Europe, paid for by every single tax-paying human being in the Union; then we saw the temerity of Slovakia, refusing to back a package of financial aid to Greece, after which the European Parliament basically threatened to throw Slovakia out if its parliament didn’t do what the Eurocrats thought it should do.

NOW WE HAVE THE ULTIMATE threat to the European Union: a Prime Minister of a sovereign nation asking his own population whether they approve of a measure made at committee tables in Brussels. This cannot be allowed. It would be the end of the free lunches and drinks as we know them in Brussels. The last straw indeed; but it must not be allowed to be the last straw in the Manhattan cocktail. So Gorgeous George will have to go. Watch this space.