Altiero Spinelli and the truth about the EU "project"

You may not have heard of Altiero Spinelli, but you should have. Altiero Spinelli was one of the founding fathers of what would become the European Union. Altiero Spinelli was a member of the Communist Party from a very early age and in June 1941, he and some fellow prisoners of Mussolini completed the Ventotene Manifesto, a document in support of a new European federalist movement. This was later adopted as the programme of the Movimento Federalista Europeo, which Spinelli founded in August 1943. The Manifesto put forward proposals for creating a European federation of states, the primary aim of which was to tie European countries so closely together that they would no longer be able to go to war with one another. As in many European left-wing political circles, this sort of move towards federalist ideas was argued as a reaction to the destructive excesses of nationalism. The ideological underpinnings for a united Europe can thus be traced to the hostility of nationalism. Spinelli thought that the European Parliament should act as a constituent assembly and when the European Parliament adopted the Draft Treaty Establishing the European union in 1984, the drafter of which had been Spinelli himself, this came into being.

Christopher Booker in today's Sunday Telegraph recalls that it was Spinelli 60 years ago who "wrote that its aim should be stealthily to assemble the components of a supranational government and only to declare its true purpose at the end of the process by unveiling a "constitution"."

"It is more than 50 years since another founder, Paul-Henri Spaak, advised Jean Monnet, who was above all "the Father of Europe", that the only way to achieve their goal – a politically integrated Europe – was to pretend that it was only a "Common Market"."

"It is more than 40 years since Harold Macmillan and Edward Heath went along with this, deciding to withhold from the British people that the real aim was a European state – a deceit perpetrated by Heath in spades when he took us into the Common Market in the 1970s."

Christopher Booker continues "of all the immense changes this will make in how we are governed, none is arguably more important, or has received less attention, than the formal creation of the European Council as the cabinet of our new government. The prime ministers who make it up are placed under a wholly new obligation to put their loyalty to "the Union" above that to their own countries."

Of course NotaSheep has paid attention to this before and you can read that article here.