EU Elections: Apathy as a Form of Protest    [1979]

[This article by Desmond Greaves was carried in the November 1979 issue of the monthly “Irish Democrat”  – 1979 being the year of the first direct elections to the European Parliament in Strasbourg/Brussels.]

Do you know that the first by-election to the so-called European “Parliament” took place last month?  And that it took place in London?

It would be small surprise if you did not, for the press did not make much of what they knew beforehand was going to be a complete damp-squib!

For if public interest in the EEC election last June was so low in Britain, the turn-out in the by-election in the London South West area was likely to be ludicrous.

In a massive display of apathy, less than one in five of the 516,000 voters bothered to go to the polls. The turnout was only 19% compared with 31% in June last.

In one area, Lambeth, less than 13% voted!

But was it apathy?  In bus-queues, shops, trains, launderettes, wherever people have a chance to exchange words, there you will hear them denouncing the Common Market. But let them not forget the people who tricked them into it.

The guilty parties are Heath and Jenkins  [i.e. Edward Heath, Conservative Prime Minister who brought the UK into the EEC in 1973, and Roy Jenkins, former Labour Hone Secretary and later EEC Commissioner, who led Labou rParty  support for EEC entry].

A clear expression of EEC super- imperialism came from EEC Foreign Affairs Commissioner M. Poniatowski at the Tory Party conference.

There was no longer any dominant economy to stabilise the world economy, he said.  The global political balance born of the last war was broken. American power no longer counterbalanced Russian power throughout the world. Military balance was also heading towards a breaking point, he said, and “in the great race for space control there was no telling who would emerge in the position of absolute power.”

That has to be a “European coherence” in approaching major world problems, the Frenchman told the Tories. He forecast increasingly heavy competition from Third World countries as they became industrialised, and the sharpening of competition from Japan as the “little Japans” –  Korea, Singapore, Taiwan and Hong Kong – became more developed. The immense Chinese resources in energy and raw materials, coupled with Japanese technology and financial means, also suggested an economic upheaval before the end of the century.

It is a world of the warring blocs, cut-throat competition, continuing arms race and an  attempt to keep the poor countries in their place, which this leading European sees, “Europe” must get together to be in on the act, says he.  And so he tells the Tories to continue and be good Europeans, so that France and Germany can effectively  dominate the new Superpower.

The destruction of democracy in England proceeds apace.  A Liberal peer and a Liberal member of the House of Commons were both refused the right to question a minister on the reason why the Executive had refused to obey the ruling of a judge.

And we never stop hearing about the rule of law.

Things are getting to such a pass that nobody any longer expects anything but  arbitrariness and the dictatorship of the bureaucratic machine.

We have never been to Czechoslovakia and have no special desire to go there. It is difficult however not to take with a grain of salt the loud protestations of horror at recent trials.  There is plenty to match it, and you don’t have to look far.

Mrs Thatcher has fallen in with the Euro-lobby for nuclear power stations of the most dangerous kind.

Who composes this lobby?  Huge engineering firms who make millions of pounds on every reactor they build.  

Reactors are not getting too good a press just now, especially in France. There the  Government decided to ignore statements by engineers that cracks had appeared in places where they could not be mended.

At one point Trade Unionists refused to work on them, and for a time there was a pause.

Now at the time of writing it is admitted that radioactive materials are percolating out of a reactor near Lyons. And the French Government has introduced a press black-out so that the public will not know their danger.

Not surprising therefore that the standard of public life in this corner of the EEC is so low that newspapers openly accused French President Giscard d’Estaing of accepting gifts of diamonds from an African ruler who practised cannibalism and sometimes entertained eighty guests to human flesh derived from his political opponents, and machine gunned a hundred innocent schoolchildren.

Another thing was reported. A great burning of documents in certain parts of the diplomatic service!