Pssst! Anyone wanna buy a used Olympic torch? There are 8,000 of them, turned out by a firm in Coventry at £495 a time. That's a total cost of £3,396,000 for what amounts to a pile of ornate gas lighters.

And there was me thinking there was only one, singular and unique, bearing Promethean fire from the land of mythic gods and monsters, changing hands en route to its final destination in London.

Wrong.

Some of these contraptions have been flogged on the net already - for charity of course. So that's all right. At least one proud torch-bearer showed admirable enterprise by trying to flog his torch in advance of actually chugging the statutory 300 metres with it.

Well I'll go to the foot of Mount Olympus.

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We're selling £50m-worth of pork to China. The Chinese enjoy eating the ears, the trotters. Apparently we have made them an offal they can't refuse.

So we're selling pigs to China and making more cars than Germany, but little of that is deemed worthy of headline news. Instead, we're told of warnings by dubious credit rating agencies and are shown economics experts wringing their hands as the camera tracks them in eurozone capitals.

One thing runs into another. Up comes an image of Ezra Pound chanting his warning about the insidious banking practice of usury and telling the vainglorious, small-minded and bombastic...

Thou art a beaten dog beneath the hail,
A swollen magpie in a fitful sun,
Half black half white
Not knowest'ou wing from tail
Pull down thy vanity
How mean thy hates
Fostered in falsity,
Pull down thy vanity,
Rathe to destroy, niggard in charity,
Pull down they vanity, I say pull down...

And this image runs with the pulse of The Boy in the Bubble, that exhilarating but mordant song by Paul Simon and Forere Motholheloa which opens the album Graceland:-

It was a slow day
And the sun was beating
On the soldiers by the side of the road
There was a bright light
A shattering of shop windows
The bomb in the baby carriage
Was wired to the radio
These are the days of miracle and wonder
This is the long distance call
The way the camera follows us in slo-mo
The way we look to us all
The way we look to a distant constellation
That's dying in a corner of the sky
These are the days of miracle and wonder
And don't cry baby, don't cry
Don't cry

It was a dry wind
And it swept across the desert
And it curled into the circle of birth
And the dead sand
Falling on the children
The mothers and the fathers
And the automatic earth
These are the days of miracle and wonder
This is the long distance call
The way the camera follows us in slo-mo
The way we look to us all
The way we look to a distant constellation
That's dying in a corner of the sky
These are the days of miracle and wonder
And don't cry baby, don't cry
Don't cry

When those lines were cut in the mid-1980s, the distant constellation dying in a corner of the sky could have been apartheid in South Africa, Soviet Communism or simply be an embodying image for all human hope in fallible empires of one sort or another. Irrespective of what was in the authors' minds at the time they created it, that image of collapse speaks to me now of the European Union, with its blue flag and constellation of gold stars.

And the dry wind sweeping across the desert, a symbol of serial famine and want, has swept out of power dictators in Libya, Egypt, Tunisia, with mothers, fathers and children still paying a terrible price for the struggle for liberty in Syria. Incidentally, five or six years after that song was sung Operation Desert Storm blew Saddam Hussain's Iraqui army out of Kuwait and back across the desert.

One thing runs into another. Ozymandius is falling. The consequence of hubris and deception. All one can do is affirm that these are the days of miracle and wonder and take the advice offered: don't cry, baby, don't cry.

Posted by Jim Greenhalf at 04:40 0 comments Links to this post Print icon18_edit_allbkg[i-icon18_edit_allbkg]

Did you know that for the first time since 1976 cars manufactured in the UK produced a trade surplus, with exports of £6.1billion exceeding imports by a reported £561m?

I know only two things about motor manufacture in the UK. Most of it is owned by foreigners and, historically, the industry was a red hotbed of industrial strife.

But according to recent figures by the Office of National Statistics, export sales for the first three months of 2012 showed a 20 per cent rise on the previous quarter.

Nissan plans to produce two new models at its plant in Sunderland. Jaguar Land Rover wants to employ 1,000 more people at its Halewood plant. And Honda wants to almost double production in Swindon.

Even to a bear of astoundingly little brain the first car exporting surplus for 36 years sounds like, well, good news, if I may mention the phrase, such is the contemporary relish for darkness and despair and the Norns hovering above the eurozone.

Where did I find this reason to shout 'Come on England!' and look forward with renewed hope? Tucked away in a paragraph at the top of  page 30 in today's Guardian.

There is a tailpiece, deliciously. The turbo-charged sales increase was driven largely by sales to non-EU countries, reportedly up by nearly 29 per cent.

Tee-hee.

Furthermore...reportedly, General Motors will today give the go ahead for the new Vauxhall Astra to be built at Ellesemere Port, saving 2,100 jobs and perhaps greatly adding to the number if the shift pattern increases from two to three a day.

Can it really be true that they make 47 cars an hour compared to only 30 at the plant in Germany?

Vorsprung durch technik lad, as they say in Cheshire.

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In 1955, Vladimir Nabakov's novel Lolita was published in France. Graham Greene said it was one of the three best novels he'd read that year. Others thought the book was filthy pornography.

What aroused repugnance, perhaps, wasn't so much Humbert Humbert's sexual obsession with his 12-year-old step daughter Dolores Haze but her willingness to have sex with him. The idea of a young girl sexually seducing a middle-aged man proved too much for some. Unsurprisingly, the row that followed only aroused the public's curiosity. There is a reference to this in the Hancock's Half-Hour radio comedy called The Missing Page.

In 1971, Mike Hodges' movie thriller Get Carter got a mixed reception, in spite of Roy Budd's eerie soundtrack. The film is now acknowledged as a masterpiece; but at the time the idea of Michael Caine as a heartless Newcastle-born gangster, Jack Carter, didn't gell. What may have turned people's stomachs was the sub-plot. Carter returns home to find out why his brother Frank died, allegedly in a car crash. In the course of his investigations, Carter stumbles upon graphic evidence that Frank's daughter Doreen has been groomed to take part in group sex films with adults.

Men and women corrupting the vulnerable young for criminal or immoral purposes is not new. Ever since the publication in 1838 of the first part of Oliver Twist the public has associated the murkier regions of East London with the spectres of Fagin, Bill Sikes and Nancy. Nancy's Steps, on the South Bank of Southwark Bridge, I think it is, is a landmark.

But as we know from today's Times (9/5/12) the predatory grooming of young females has been rife in towns and cities from the Midlands to Glasgow.

If Charles Dickens was alive and writing today, his take on the criminal grooming of displaced youngsters might be called Olivia Twist. His teenage hero would be a teenage heroine; Fagin would be a Pakistani Muslim. The action would take place in Rochdale, Manchester, Blackburn, Leeds or Bradford. There would be no happy ending, no benevolent intervention by Mr Brownlow or Mrs Bedwin.

Two girls from children's homes in Manchester and Rochdale, according to the newspaper, died in separate incidents as a result of sexual abuse by "men of Pakistani heritage". Reportedly, over the past five years a further 629 incidents of girls being sold for sex have been recorded.

Official inquiries into this matter were crippled by "racial sensitivities". For example, in 1991, nine girls from three residential homes in Bradford were similarly used and abused by pimps. Bradford Council's subsequent inquiry, said The Times, did not reveal that the culprits were all of Pakistani origin.

Does racial origin matter? If there is something in the culture of these men, and the nine Muslim men convicted at Liverpool Crown Court, and the two Muslim men convicted at Bradford Crown Court, yesterday, that convinces them that young girls are trash, then it does matter.

We have become accustomed to two distinct forms of sexual abuse of youngsters, as The Times' report says:- White men, acting alone, are responsible for most chil sex-offences in this country yet in Heywood, as in so many of the towns and cities of northern England, a different model of exploitation has taken root over the past 20 years. Born of a collision between two cultures, it has led to the normalisation of a grotesque, collective game in which vulnerable girls are systematically targeted, groomed and then sold for sex to men who view them with contempt...

...The men offering such largesse belonged to a sub-section of British Pakistani society that does not frown upon males in their 30s and 40s pouring half a litre of vodka down the throat of a girl of 13 before lining up to have sex with them...

...The jury listened in horrified fascination as the girl explained that Pakistani men "pass you around like a ball"..."Most of them don't even know you but you meet them anyway. If I gave a taxi driver my number, give it two weeks and I'll have about ten Pakis in my phone. By the next week I'll have a phone book of Pakis."

Mohammed Shafiq, chief executive of the Rochdale-based Ramadhan Foundation, is only too aware of the problems of racial sensitivities. In the same edition of the newspaper he writes:- Since January 2011, when I last wrote about street-grooming for this newspaper, there has been an increase in the number of young people speaking out against such men. Across the country I meet young British Pakistanis who abhor what has been happening and are sickened by the behaviour of these criminals, even more so because they come from our community.

They accept that British Pakistanis are over-represented in such offending and that their actions bring shame on themselves, their families and their community. Five years ago it was very different. I was threatened with violence because people thought that by speaking out I was doing the work of the Far Right. How things have changed.

The bad news is that we have a generational split. Sadly, our community leaders say that this has nothing to do with them and that they have no responsibility to tackle the issue. They think it is all a big conspiracy. I have tried to make them wake up to the threat that these criminals pose to the integrity of our community, only to be met with total silence. The difference in attitude between our younger and older generations presents a continuing challenge.

The challenge is made more difficult by political correctness. Not admitting the obvious, however unpalatable to racial sensitivities, only leads to self-deception and more trouble. Playing down criminal activity for fear of the accusation of racism or giving heart to the Far Right is the usual excuse offered for saying or doing nothing.

In 2003 I reviewed a crime novel called On Dangerous Ground written by Keighley author Lesley Horton. The genesis of her story was a Barnardo's Report in the mid-1990s which stated that there were more child prostitutes in Bradford and Keighley than anywhere else in the country. Mrs Horton, who was the head of a unit for pregnant schoolgirls, told me that Bradford's Vice Squad had told her that Bradford did not have child prostitution, otherwise they'd know about it.

Bradford in a state of denial? It wouldn't be the first time, nor the last. The 2001 Muslim Riot - 244 men were identified and convicted for arson, looting and violence, all of them Muslim men - is now known as the "disturbance", doubtless for fear of offending racial sensitivities. Revisiting history is one thing; but does re-writing it because circumstances appear to have changed do any good? Perhaps we should we no longer refer to Nazis as Germans or Northern Europeans.

Wickedness is not the preserve of the naturally wicked: it is integral to the human condition, irrespective of racial origin. However, nurture or culture may play a part in warping human nature.

In 2004, in a small theatre above a pub in Camden, a small audience saw the premiere of David Hines' play Nymphs and Shepherds, a 90-minute monologue by a character called Oliver, an unrepentant white male paedophile. Oliver's graphic reflections are particularly shocking because they are candid, unapologetic and, like Lolita, touch upon a taboo subject.

But the purpose of Hines' play is to show that men who prey upon little girls are not demons. If they were they would be easy to identify. They are human beings in the grip of a drive, a predilection, which even they may not understand. It is the volatility of their compulsion that makes them dangerous.

The danger for sociey at large is when private compulsion becomes a corporate enterprise, as in Bradford, Rochdale, Manchester and elsewhere.

Posted by Jim Greenhalf at 07:44 1 comments Links to this post Print icon18_edit_allbkg[i-icon18_edit_allbkg]

In a few hours it will all be over. The voters of Bradford Metropolitan District, with all their hopes and expectations and thoughts in 140 languages, will know who their next local rulers are.

For the past 12 years no single party has had overall control. I expect more of the same, not that many of you, gentle skimmer, will give a Frenchman's fart who gets in and who drops out. Why should you?

Blogs are as much an expression of vanity as anything else - truth, beauty, sheer bloody anger, contempt, exasperation, mockery. Please excuse mine when I say that, in years gone by, one of my jobs was to organise election coverage and to comment upon the results. Naming the vulnerable seats became part of it and, luckily, I had a Labour Party contact who was a gifted local psepheologist.

In the spirit of times past I rang him up the other day to ask his opinion. Retirement and sickness have taken their toll. No longer in the thick of it, he nevertheless agreed that George Galloway's Respect Party probably would take some seats - four to six - and that the leader of Bradford Council, one of thirty councillors defending their seats, was likely to lose his.


This confirmed what I had been told by two other sources, one in the Labour Party, the other a man with a lot of electioneering experience. The Galloway Effect, to give a name to a phenomenon I have not experienced personally in the backstreets of inner-city Bradford but know of by instinct, a well-seasoned instinct I may say, has so far surprised those who rely on past events to give them a measure of the present. His opponents thought he was a joke, until he won Bradford West on March 29.

Mr Galloway has been calling for voters to get rid of Bradford Council leader Ian Greenwood and to vote for in favour of having an elected mayor. Both have a good chance of happening.

Councillor Greenwood has been a bearded presence in City Hall for many years, first as an official for the National Association of Local Government Officers, then as a Labour Party politician. Twelve years ago the council carried out a consultation exercise on the issue of an elected mayor. Eighteen thousand people voted in favour of an elected leader and cabinet government; but nineteen thousand voted in favout of an elected mayor. The council ignored the latter and maintained the status quo which over the past 12 years has been the source of not a little scandal and a great deal of exasperation. Britain's curry capital is ready for a taste of something different.

Today, George Galloway and his Respect Party candidates embody hope and expctation of various kinds to a wide variety of people - by no means all of them inner-city Muslims. To sympathetic well-to-do white voters he represents a broom that will sweep away the old dusty complacencies which, in their view, have held the place back. I can't speak with certainty about what he represents to the families and clans of inner-city ethnic voters. For some of them he will be an opportunity, a conduit of influence and prestige; perhaps more. Others doubtless see him as one who will speak for them on national and international platforms. Which other Bradford MP is likely to be invited on to Question Time, Any Questions or be grilled by Jeremy 'Oh, come on now' Paxman on Newsnight?

Mr G, only too aware of the power of his voice, knows this. He said right from the start that he is here to make a difference to the lives of the people of Bradford. It's been a long time since an MP talked to them like that. So for a while at least the spotlight is going to be on him. He can use his position in the public eye either to gratify his vanity or draw attention to things that need doing, that can be done. It's up to George to decide whether he is going to be either a great joy or a bad joke.

. Subsequently: Ian Greenwood did lose his seat, after four recounts, by 17 votes. There were 22 spoiled ballot papers. That's life. Respect gained five seats. Bradford said 'no' to an elected mayor.

Posted by Jim Greenhalf at 11:58 0 comments Links to this post Print icon18_edit_allbkg[i-icon18_edit_allbkg]

Over the past week the Telegraph & Argus has published two photographs of prospective Bradford Council candidates, both Muslim men. One is posing with a Kalashnikov sub-machine gun, the other is holding a Rocket Propelled Grenade launcher.

The photos were reportedly taken years ago on the Pakistan-Afghan border. Their publication, first on the net and then in the newspaper, is part of the propaganda war that has been going on between the Labour Party and George Galloway's Respect Party since Galloway's crushing paliamentary by-election victory in Bradford West last month.

Twelve Respect candidates are competing for seats at this Thursday's district council elections. Forget the Conservatives and the Liberal-Democrats, the other main party contenders: the real interest lies with how well or badly Galloway's doughty dozen do.

The sight of the two men posing with weapons of messy destruction brought to mind that piece of Nazi newspaper propaganda showing Winston Churchill in a pinstriped suit, cigar in mouth, holding a Thompson sub-machine gun, suggesting that he was no better than a Chicago gangster (precisely how Bertolt Brecht depicted Hitler and his cronies in his play The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui ).

The photos also prompted a burst of nostalgia for the good old days of the 1970s and 1990s, the days of John Poulson, T Dan Smith and 'Donnygate', when councillors, officials and men of property, from Newcastle-upon-Tyne in Northumberland to Doncaster in South Yorkshire, were done for simple honest-to-goodness corruption. They were only trying to line their own pockets, either by telling porkies about their expenses, or by taking kick-backs from grateful property developers for dodgy planning decisions.

These days a lot of them conspire to rip off the public by implementing a range of dubious and, some say, illegal charges, fees and fines which annually rake in many millions of pounds.

Over the past seven years up to ten Bradford councillors - most of them Conservatives - have been done for a variety crimes and misdemeanours, ranging from driving away from the scene of a hit-and-run incident, sexually abusing schoolgirls,cruelty to animals and poking fun at the opposition contrary to the spirit of the National Standards Board (now abolished).

There are Electoral Commission rules governing who can be elected in England and Wales. Disqualifications include employment by the local authority (unless you are a chairman or vice-chairman), being the subject of a bankruptcy restrictions order (bankruptcy itself is not a bar to standing for council), being convicted of corrupt or illegal electoral practices, and serving a term of imprisonment of three months or more five years before polling day.

Bradford Council's constitution of codes and protocols governing councillors' conduct runs to 50 pages. The top ten commandments of THOU SHALT NOTs include:-
. Causing the council to breach any of the 2006 Equality laws
. Bullying or intimidating anyone who may be either a complainant or a witness
. Compromising the impartiality of council employees
. Disclosing confidential information
. Doing anything that brings the councillor's office or the council into disrepute
. Misusing their position to improperly gain advantages either for themselves or others
. Concealing personal interest especially in matters of business, land, property and planning

Political parties have rules of behaviour too. If a councillor embarrasses or disgraces the party he or should could have the whip withdrawn, although this would not prevent them from remaining a councillor.

Democracy allows the public to challenge the system. The trouble comes when you try to change it, as Christine Eborall found out when she campaigned for a petition on the subject of an elected mayor for the London borough of Ealing. She subsequently wrote and self-published a little book about her experiences, Stitch-up in Ealing. It sounds like an Ealing comedy. For Mrs Eborall it was a rude awakening.

Although she eventually got her way, her book provides an insight into what really goes on behind the picture depicted by official local authority and party political press releases:-

Power stays in power. Everything, it was claimed, was controlled from the top and there were powerful networks and alliances, some going back to India and the time of partition. Money comes from local business people to whom it was made very clear where their interests lie. This funded the payment of party membership fees in return for votes at elections and at meetings to select candidates to stand as ward councillors...

Candidacies were offered as rewards, and those selected were from the 'right' families or of limited ability, sometimes illiterate, so that control is maintained...They encouraged Asian people to believe that they could achieve political status by participating in, or conniving at, corruption...

The practice of selecting people of low calibre and limited command of English as councillors no doubt made them easier to control. But it also made it easier for archetypal white middle-class, mainly male, councillors such as the Acton Mafia to dominate the senior positions in council and thereby continue to hold the lion's share of power and influence...

Interestingly, a day or two before I was given Mrs Eborall's book to read, I was told the following by a senior Bradford councillor:-

"I never knew politics in Bradford be as unpredictable. We've got to have a huge revolution in this city because we are stuck. We need a complete change of political culture. It's a toxic culture where people say, 'Do something about X', and we can't. One of the problems is the council doesn't have the powers it used to have. We can't even choose where to build our schools.

"There is a pecking order of class, clan and family in the inner cities of Keighley and Bradford, a network of loyalties that supersedes party loyalty and is rooted in Mipur. A lot of people are alienated about the way politics is done in Bradford. Ed Miliband heard criticism from young Asians about the selection of some candidates who couldn't speak English."

Is anyone really surprised that two people from opposite parts of England, North and South as it were, should be talking about the same problems?

Posted by Jim Greenhalf at 08:11 0 comments Links to this post Print icon18_edit_allbkg[i-icon18_edit_allbkg]

Periodically, every country goes through a crisis of identity. Demography changes, borders change, internal boundaries change, international relations change - friends become foes and foes friends.

Throughout the chronicle of recorded time countries have expanded, contracted or have, like Poland and Persia, vanished temporarilly or permanently. Historically, mainland Europe has been accustomed to the rise and fall of nations within the contours of its geography. Prague was governed by Vienna, Rome by Paris, and in World War II all four were governed by Berlin. Today, they all are governed by Brussels. Wars and revolutions are volcanoes; in the aftermath the landscape changes, maps have to be changed: Czechoslovakia becomes the Czech Republic, the USSR breaks up into its constituent republics, the United Kingdom becomes a satellite of the European Union.

In my lifetime the EU has had almost as many incarnations as Shakespeare's seven ages of man. In my youth the European Economic Community (EEC) of six nations was scarcely a blip on the horizon of my consciousness. By my thirtieth year in 1979, it had got bigger and much closer. The 1972 European Communities Act had gone through Parliament, our currency had been changed to decimal, elections for the European Parliament were taking place. In my fourty-fourth year the 1993 Maastrict Treaty was ratified and the EEC became the European Community (EC) with fifteen member states and a flag of its own - blue with a gas ring of gold stars that reminded me of Custer's Seventh Cavalry. By then I had visited Brussels and Luxembourg. In my fifty-eighth year the EC became the European Union with twenty-seven member states, seventeen of which had given up their own currency in exchange for the euro. Monetary union was the precursor of the original idea behind the entire enterprise: political union.

Throughout these six decades, an idea has pervaded the political, social and literary culture of this country, the idea of angst. Superficially, this looks like post-war Existential anxiety of the Jean Paul Sartre kind. One of the features of my frenetic youth, before I learned from Christopher Hampton's play Total Eclipse that what was aestetically plausible wasn't necessarily true, was the specious linking of disparate political and social events to cultural phenomena. Thus, Beckett's Waiting for Godot and John Osborne's Look Back in Anger embodied the crisis of national identity that resulted from the loss of empire and Suez. Though which was cause and which was effect had me stumbling over definitions of deductive and inductive reasoning. The literature of pre-revolutionary Russia is ripe with characters worrying about whether they have become "superfluous" - a nineteenth century form of angst.

Who are we, what are we, what is any of it worth, did not originate from the independence of India in 1947 or the invasion of Egypt in 1956. These universal questions have been around at least since the three temptations of Christ - at least Dostoyevsky's Grand Inquisitor thought so (see chapter five of The Brothers Karamazov). Nevertheless, they have been projected as the Questions of Our Time during my brief lifetime. Every so often they break out, red and raw. The recent Channel 4 programme Make Bradford British aroused the irritable rash of identity, once again making perfect strangers red in the face at the thought of all pervasive foreigners, political correctness and red tape. Ambivalent as I am about most things, I felt swayed first one way, then the other, as the debate, largely manufactured by newspapers, raged on.

And then, yesterday, my friend Richard North mailed me a Foreign and Commonwealth Office paper entitled Sovereignty and the European Communities. I was startled. The thrust of what I understood from this 15-page document was that while the nation was getting knotted up over identity a huge amount of national sovereignty has been sheered away from the white cliffs of Dover, deliberately not accidentally. The identity crisis had been a distraction. What had vanished was not the national character. In spite of the creation of a Parliament for Scotland and Assemblies for Wales and Northern Ireland, the old regional rivalries were still apparent. Britain, the United Kingdom, call it what you will, was still a place of faith, hope and charity, in its support of good causes, its dislike of fatalism in response to catastrophe and something a dissident Russian poet once told me she most admired about Britain: "You are not a coward." Gullible, yes,credulous, certainly, piss-taking, abosolutely, lacking in self-confidence, of course, suspicious of seriousness, yes. In Russia, poets are expected to be prophets. In this country they are expected to be light entertainers.

Allow me to quote some extracts from this document.  Note the self-satisfied tenor of the language, which would not be out of place in a script for Yes, Prime Minister:-

We are all deeply consciious through tradition, upbringing and education of the distinctive fact of being British. Given our island position and long territorial and national integrity, the traditkional relative freedom from comprehensive foreign, especially European alliances and entanglements, this national consciousness may well be strong than that of most nations.

When 'sovereignty' is called into question in the debate about entry to the Community, people may feel that it is this 'Britishness' that is at stake. Here Mr Rippon's pointed question "are the French any less French?" for their membership (sic)...

However it is presented, entry to the Community will mean major change. It is natural and inevitable that this should be disliked and resisted by many. Even the 'loss of sovereignty' may be limited to fairly precise areas of Government and Parliamentary powers and be without significance for the lives of most of the country, still the phrase conjures up a spectre of major and uncontrollable change and of adjustments that will have to be made which are deeply disturbing...

...In entry to the Community we may seem to be opting for a system in which bureaucracy will be more remote (as well as largely foreign)...The British have long been accustomed to the belief that we play a major part in ordering the affairs of the world and that in ordering our own affairs we are beholden to none. Much of this is mere illusion. As a middle power we can proceed only by treaty, alliance and compromise. So we are dependent on others both for the effective defence of the United Kingdom and also for the commercial and international financial conditions which govern our own economy...

...Joining the Community...is a further large step away from what is thought to be unfettered national freedom and a public acknowledgement of our reduced national power; moreover, joining the Community institutionalises in a single, permanent coalition the necessary process of accommodation and alliance over large areas of policy, domestic as well as external...

...the transfer of major exceutive responsibilities to the bureaucratic Commission in Brussels will exacerbate popular feeling of alienation from government. To counter this feeling, strengthened local and regional democratic processes within the member states and effective Community regional economic and social policies will be essential...

...The Community, if we are to benefit to the full, will develop wider powers and coordinate and manage policy over wider areas of public business...To control and supervise this process it will be necessary to strengthen the democratic organisation of the Community with consequent decline of the primacy and prestige of the national parliaments.

The task will not be to arrest this process, since to do so would be to put considerations of formal sovereignty before effctive influence and power, but to adopt institutions and policies both in the UK and in Brussels to meet and reduce the real and substantial public anxieties over national identity and alienation from government, fear of change and loss of control over their fate which are aroused by talk of 'loss of sovereignty'. 

This long-sighted paper was written in April 1971, the year before the European and Communities Act. The following was written by Dostoveysky in his aforementioned novel and published in 1879:-

Mankind as a whole has always striven to organise a universal state. There have been many great nations with great histories, but the more highly they were developed the more unhappy they were, for they felt more acutely than other people the craving for world-wide union.

Dostoyevsky's Grand Inquisitor describes how a select group of 100,000 will run the lives of thousands of millions by taking away the anxieties that come with freedom. Ruled by Miracle, Mystery and Authority, the masses will be allowed to work and play and sin, strictly under the controlling guidance of these religious Bolsheviks.

The dictatorship of the proletariat has moved westwards. For the time being at least, for all empires fall eventually, we take our orders from a governing class of federal technocrats. The existential crisis of who we are and what we believe is, like the poor, always with us. The carving away of sovereignty, however you define it in relation to power and authority, is a twentieth century decision. The deliberate and progressive erosion of sovereignty, like gum recession, has weakened the teeth of the British bulldog. No point in seeking assurance from Churchill.
    

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