Do you see how we're losing our democracy yet?

Council of Europe issues a Mubarak-style diktat to Britain over prisoners’ votes

By Nile Gardiner

Hundreds of thousands of Egyptians are thronging the streets of Cairo celebrating the demise of Hosni Mubarak and demanding more freedom, but in Strasbourg and Brussels imperious Eurocrats still cling grimly to power without a shred of democratic accountability - against the backdrop of a failing European Project. In fact Western Europe is one of the few parts of the world where people are becoming politically less free, thanks to the ever-increasing enroachment of European legislation and legal rulings at the expense of national sovereignty.

And it’s only getting worse. In response to an overwhelming House of Commons vote this week against giving voting rights to prisoners, a senior member of the Council of Europe’s parliamentary committee has vigorously condemned Britain’s “defiance” of a ruling by the European Court of Human Rights, which the Council enforces.

The Daily Mail reports that Christos Pourgourides, a politician from Cyprus, is warning Great Britain to toe the line – or else:

‘I am deeply disappointed by last night’s vote, in defiance of the ruling by the European Court of Human Rights on prisoner voting.

‘I had hoped that the parliament of one of Europe’s oldest democracies – regarded as playing a leading role in protecting human rights – would have encouraged the United Kingdom to honour its international obligations, as our assembly urged only last month.

‘Every member state must implement the judgments of the court.’

How much longer does a great warrior nation with a proud history of advancing freedom and liberty across the world have to listen to authoritarian dictats from unelected European bodies that often behave with the kind of sneering impunity normally associated with third world regimes? Parliament must only be accountable to the people of Britain, not to a supranational court that sits in Strasbourg.

The sooner Britain gets out of the European Convention on Human Rights and starts returning power to the British electorate the better. My former boss Lady Thatcher could not have put it more powerfully in her book Statecraft, when she wrote:

“that such an unnecessary and irrational project as building a European superstate was ever embarked upon will seem in future years to be perhaps the greatest folly of the modern era.”