The Game Theory of Life in The Village

" So we then move on you see to another possible response, not repentance, but that of resignation :

"I quit The Game, I won't play it." 

There are all sorts of ways of doing this but basically this is an aristocratic posture, 

"You ordinary mortals with all your Desires, and all your Involvements are deluded - You Get attached to Things.

But there are a certain minority of Us, Who are above it all. 

And since We've resigned, We're not going to follow This now. " 

This as I say is an artistocratic, [be aware]  that it may be aristocratic in two ways : 

There's the aristocracy of the Hindu Sannyasi the people outside and above caste 

and there's also the aristocracy of the actual aristocrat - I get so mixed up with my British and American pronunciation on this - but 

The Aristocrat who comes on with the position of always being bored, who has complete sangfroid, who is imperturbable 

Kaiser Ling's study of this mentality is marvellous in his book of Europe the essay on Hungary portrays the rightly he calls the grand signeur. 

He always identified himself as a type disrobe the grand familia cannot be saved,  who could always be always rise to the occasion under any social circumstances whatsoever, without trying to do so or without apparently trying to do so.

In other words if he goes to the Opera wearing blue jeans he will somehow make it apparent that everybody else is improperly dressed.

This is a very interesting type of person you know there was an essay written by someone whose name I can't remember in the Centennial Review which contrasted the Attitude to Time of the

aristocracy, the bourgeoisie and the proletariat; 

It said The Aristocrat lives in The Past because his ancient forbears have achieved everything and his very by the fact of his birth in his existence he has nothing to strive for and he somehow I never need overdo it - he's always cool.

The Bourgeois on the other hand feels that it's necessary to arrive 

and he's always striving for The Future

Whereas the aristocrat lives in  The Past, on the other hand, 
The Proletarian lives in The Present because he doesn't care about his reputation, and he just lives.

And so of the three bourgeois The Sucker 

because the formula is always cheated because, well, it's going to come someday, see, you're going to get it - even your money when you pull it out of your pocket,  there says on it 

"Promise to Pay" 

- watch out for that!

It's poverty and the bourgeoisie use the news on from the whole the whole economy is the United States being the great bourgeois country is in a state of expectancy of feeling happy, not on what you have but on what is going to come 

The Aristocrat is happy on what has happened, these great achievements of the past mean there's nothing left to do except sort of glory in it.

The Proletarian wants it right now, see and they often get it; 

About the poor bourgeois, my uncle once said 

The Poor have it given them 

The Rich have it anyway so 

The Middle Classes do without

So both the aristocrats and the sannyasi have resigned.

Now, the more interesting of the two types is Acosta Sonia who Resigns From The World Game, let me review for you the role of the sannyasin in Indian culture you know there are four castes because 

The Priests or Brahmins  

The Caste of Warriors and Rulers called Kshatriya  

The Caste of Merchants called Vasia  

and The Caste of Workers called Shudra 

And to belong to a caste means that you are in  the state called grihastha, which is 'Householder' that is to say you are One Who is Involved in The World, you are engaged in what is called loca Sandra and loca means The Well, Sandra, upholding, upholding the going on of The Great Illusion and so you are playing for money for position for status, for success and hoping above all that you could win - You can beat The Game.

But it's supposed in the same Culture that every Man who attains the age of 45 or so, who has now a grown son to take over his work, will quit the game, will resign and so, when you come to be at age you're supposed to move from the state of grihastha, 'Householder' to vanaprastha which means 'Forest Dweller'.

You Give Away All Your Possessions 

to Your Son, 

You Change Your Name, 

You Take off All Your Clothes and Go More or Less Naked, 

because you have  

Abandoned Status.

So in spite of the fact that he has no status, he is however respected in the culture for being an Upper Outcast, whereas The Aborigines of the Indian Peninsula are Untouchables, The Lower Outcast and The Upper Outcast always mimics The Lower.

For example Buddha had his disciple wear ochre robes, because ochre robes were worn by convicts. 

So in the same way if today, in San Quentin, they all wear blue jeans with special kind pants and a kind of a blue denim jacket and this could well become the uniform of a new kind of sannyasi in The Western World 

and to some extent this is happening.

So this guy says 

"The Game is Not Worth The Cap, 
The Richer I Get, The More Miserable I Get"

Mo' Money, Mo' Problems.

You know how this is, you think that your problems may be monitored and you get more money.

What do you do then we've got enough money, you start worrying about your health and you can never never stop worrying about that 

Or if you're not worried about your health you worry about politics, if somebody's going to take your money away from you, worried about taxes, about Who's Cheating You.

And so a person who goes through all that he's finally 

"I don't think The Game's worth it, 

I'm going to resign."

And so Resignation or Renunciation --

 

The difference from Repentance is that it hasn't got the same kind of passion in The Resolve, that 

 

The Repentant Person Feels He's Wrong,  

Who Made a Mistake, Has Committed Sin 

and  

Wants to Get Better 

 

about the renounce first didn't concerns of that country he knows that better progress whether moral or material is an illusion and you have to understand this when you approach for example the study of Buddhism I think one of the most withering remarks I ever heard, from an oriental, he was Japanese he said once he was 

"Never forget that whereas Jesus was the Son of a Carpenter, Buddha was the son of a King" 

You know Wow! Take that! 

And it's choose it is something always about about that this is not the this is easy to see which Christianity historically was the protest of the slave class again if the Roman, establishment Buddhism was different it was the abandonment of position by an aristocracy  - 

 

That 

'We've done it. We've seen it all we've had it so now we check out and We will be therefore we will resign from all games' 

 

and if you follow this attitude to an extreme you're going to make because it all goes to the centre the same discovery that is made by the person who follows repentance to an extreme.

Just as The Repentant Person discovers that his contrition is phony, The Person Who Tries to Resign 

Will Discover That He Can't, that  -

There is no way of not playing games 

Let's go a little bit then into this Game Theory there are a lot of games that we play and not only the game of 
Can I get One Up on The Universe,  of Pretending That I'm me This Ego, With Its

Name and Its Role, The Man, 

but also we have what I call meta-games, for example the game 

My Games Better Than Your Game,

or The Game 

"I Won't Play With You Because Your Game is Vulgar, Stupid, Banal, Inferior or Whatever." 

One of the most, therefore, effective games in saying My Game is Better Than Your Game is that 

I'm Not Playing Games At All.

You are now at the lowest level we find that in the form of :

You're Not Sincere, I am Sincere 

You are Fooling, I'm not Fooling You and Being Honest with You 

Now, that's a great game and of Resignation is a form of it as to say you are children claim with toys and you haven't ever really woken up to the important concerns of life you haven't reached the dimension of ultimate sincerity all, that is to say Ultimate Reality, and in order to reach it you have to 
Resign from Distractions 

You hear a great deal in the literature about meditation of getting rid of distractions wandering for well I you might ask when you think about all that what are wandering for what are wrong for what shouldn't I be doing with my mind, well they all say actually every day you think about this and then you think about that in your thoughts run on in an undisciplined way from one association to another and you can't keep your mind fully on the job or whatever so you see, you're supposed to announce that because -

 

That's True Reality, all those wandering thoughts they're not about the importance now, What's Important, What should you keep your mind on well, something just as long as you keep your mind on it.

In an instruction one of the Buddhist scriptures says about concentration, 

When they concentrate on a yellow square on the ground, on the burning tip of an incense stick, on your navel, on the tip of your nose on the, centre between the eyes, or anything.

And then the footnote The Commentator adds  

"But not on any wicked thing." 

As you know that commentators the world over, they never have any [sense of humour].

So anything will do just so long as you keep your mind on it, and don't wander, stick to it, so 

 Wandering is Involvement in Games,

by this kind of definition, so then you try to get out can you now get out can you stop competing with other human beings 

In ancient Greek society there was a place in the center of the community called the argon A-R-G-O-N and this was a place for contests where they had wrestling matches and other athletic events because all the men were constantly trying to show who was the better and from this were the agonyax which means these the contest itself held in the argon we get our word agony, the struggle and striving to be superior and a lot of people that you meet among you,  you will recognize this among your friends all the time are not happy unless they are involved in the contest it doesn't matter what it is, so long as they're trying to beat something they're  happy 

And you may say over everything 

“You know can't we just sit around and talk instead of having to play a game, or bet or do something to prove who's the stronger...?" 

I was married to a girl who never was happy unless she was engaged in some kind of combat, when of course I had a game, it didn't look like one,  and so it was a very superior game just because it didn't look like one,  but it was a form of the game, my games that renews so you can't really not-play, you may go through the motions of not playing, but you still are. 

Not My Favourite Play

Like Gloucester at the end 

of his cliff, eh, Watson?

"The Universe — the entire space-time continuum, from big bang to heat death, no less — was not a linear stream of events 

with beginning, middle, and end. 

That was only how it felt from the inside. 

In fact, the totality of existence looked more like a ball of sphincters, constantly moving through itself in a way that was hypnotic and awe inspiring to observe. There was Shakespeare scribbling King Lear 

on one wrinkled fold, and just around the corner from him, 

forever out of his line of sight, was the Cretaceous period and tyrannosaurs padding past his wife Anne Hathaway’s cottage.

And, as if to confirm that ours was not the only universe, it was explained to me that what I was seeing was a nursery of some kind. In order to grow their “offspring,” the chrome angels had to “make” time, because, as they pointed out reasonably, only in time were things able to grow as I understood it. Time was a kind of incubator, and all life on Earth was one thing, a single weird anemone-like mega-Hydra with its single-celled immortal root in the Precambrian tides and its billions of sensory branches, from ferns to people, with every single detail having its own part to play in the life cycle of a slowly complexifying, increasingly self-aware super-organism. It was as if I had been shown an infant god, attached to a placental support system called Earth, where it could grow bigger, more elaborate, more connected, and more intelligent. 

Growing at its tips were machine parts; 

cyborg tools made from the planet’s mineral resources. 

It seemed to be constructing around itself a part-mechanical shell, like armor or a spacesuit. “It” was us, all life seen as one from the perspective of a higher dimension.

I was told to return and take up my duties as a “midwife” to this gargantuan raw nervous system. It was important to ensure the proper growth and development of the larva and to make certain it didn’t panic or struggle too much when it woke up to its true nature as a singular life form. Incidentally, what we experienced as “evil” was simply the effects of inoculation against some cosmic disease, so I wasn’t to worry much.

Sigmund Freud: 

Who am I, that your friends should wish us to meet? 

Sherlock Holmes: 

Beyond the fact that you are a brilliant Jewish physician 

who was born in Hungary and studied for a while in Paris, 

and that certain radical theories of yours 

have alienated the respectable medical community, 

so that you have severed your connections with various hospitals 

and branches of the medical fraternity, 

beyond this I can deduce little. 

You're married, with a child of five. 

You enjoy Shakespeare and possess 

a keen sense of honour.

Sherlock Holmes: 

I never guess : it is an appalling habit, 

destructive to the logical faculty. 

A private study is an ideal place for 

observing facets of a man's character --

That the study belongs to you exclusively 

is evident from the dust : 

not even The Maid is permitted here, 

else she would scarcely have ventured 

to let matters come to this pass. 

Sigmund Freud: 

Go on. 

Sherlock Holmes: 

Very well. Now, when a man collects books on a subject, 

they're usually grouped together, but notice, 

your King James Bible, your Book of Mormon, 

and Koran are separate, across the room in fact, 

from your Hebrew Bible and Talmud, 

which sit on your desk. 

Now these books have a special importance for you 

not connected with a general study of religion, obviously. 

The nine-branched candelabra on your desk 

confirms my suspicion that you are of the Jewish faith; 

it is called a menorah, is it not? 

Sigmund Freud: 

Ja. 

Sherlock Holmes: 

That you studied medicine in Paris is to be inferred 

from the great number of medical texts in that language. 

Where else should a German use French textbooks but in France, 

and who but a brilliant German could understand 

the complexities of medicine in a foreign tongue? 

That you're fond of Shakespeare is to be deduced 

from this book, which is lying face downwards. 

The fact that you have not adjusted the volume 

suggests to my mind that you no doubt intended 

referring to it again in the near future. (Hm, not my favorite play.) 

The absence of dust on the cover 

would tend to confirm this hypothesis. 

That you're a physician is evident when 

I observe you maintain a consulting room. 

Your separation from various societies 

is indicated by these blank spaces 

surrounding your diploma, 

clearly used at one time to display 

additional certificates. 

Now, what can it be that forces a man to remove 

these testimonials to his success? 

Why, only that he has ceased to affiliate himself 

with these various societies and hospitals and so forth, 

and why do this, having once troubled to join them all? 

It is possible that he became disenchanted 

with one or two of them, 

but NOT likely that his disillusionment 

extended to all. Rather, I postulate 

it is THEY who became disenchanted 

with YOU, Doctor, and asked you 

to resign, from all of them. 

Why, I've no idea. But some position 

you have taken, evidently a medical one, 

has discredited you in their eyes. 

I take the liberty of inferring a theory of some sort, 

too radical or shocking to gain ready acceptance 

in current medical thinking. 

Your wedding ring tells me of your marriage, 

your Balkanized accent hints Hungary or Moravia, 

the toy soldier on the floor here ought, I think, 

to belong to a... small boy of five? 

Have I omitted anything of importance? 

Sigmund Freud: 

My sense of Honour. 

Sherlock Holmes: 

Oh, it is implied by the fact that you have removed the plaques 

from the societies to which you no longer belong. 

In the privacy of your study, only 

you would know the difference.

Thanatocracy

"Personally, I think The Survivors would envy The Dead."

Krusty The Clown 

(Quoting The Rand Corporation's Study on Limited Global Thermonuclear War)

The [Dr. Strangelove] War Room,

Sideshow Bob's Last Gleening

[The One w. The Fourth Doctor in it]

Thanatocracy

Noun

(plural thanatocracies)

1. Nominal governance by a dead person, through posthumous holding of an official position of authority, or by popular veneration and lasting influence of a personal ideology.

2. The enactment of mass and organized killing as an official policy of a state.

3. The enactment of policies held to lead, directly or indirectly, to death or an increased risk of death.

4. A culture in which rituals relating to the dead play a unique or important role.

5. (figuratively) Endemic stagnation or decay.

Origin

From Greek thanato-, "death", and -cracy, "rule".

" Mrs.John Brown "- The Queen-Consort is Dead;  and The Queen may as well be...

" King Edward [VII]’s apprenticeship for the monarchy was a long one. In 1861 his father, Prince Albert of Saxe- Coburg- Gotha, died. Edward’s mother, Queen Victoria, went into deep mourning and did not emerge from it during the 40 remaining years of her life. The queen was an occultist, as befits a royal house which has always been dominated by Venetians.

Queen Victoria retreated to her castle at Balmoral in the Scottish highlands, 500 miles north of London. The court was organized as a death cult, with every pretense that Albert was still alive. His laundry had to be done, and his nightgown laid out every night. Hot water was brought to his room every morning, and the chamber pot cleaned. There were two guest books, one for the queen, one for Albert, and so on. Victoria made repeated attempts to contact the shade of Prince Albert in the underworld – or the beyond – and these became the origins of the modern British occult bureau. As a result of these seances, the queen became convinced that John Brown, her Scottish gillie (attendant), was a powerful medium through whom the spirit of Albert addressed her. Gossip seeped out from Balmoral to London that John Brown was “the queen’s stallion,” granted every conjugal privilege, including adjoining bedrooms far from the ladies-in-waiting. A pamphlet about the queen appeared entitled “Mrs. John Brown.” 

Victoria was very like Miss Habisham of Satis House in the Dickens novel “Great Expectations.” This was the woman for whom time had stopped when she had lost her husband. When we factor in the frequent orders made for opium and heroin at the local Balmoral pharmacy, we get a picture of Victoria’s life in the Highlands. 

Prim and straight laced it was not.

"Windsor" - The House That Jack Built

"Edward VII’s first son was Prince Albert Victor Edward, known in the family as Prince Eddy and formally as the Duke of Clarence and Avondale. Prince Eddy, like his father, had been considered mentally impaired in his youth.

Prince Eddy was arrested at least once in a homosexual brothel. His main claim to fame today is that he is the prime suspect in the Jack the Ripper murders. This grisly series of crimes involved the murder of five prostitutes in the Whitechapel- Spitalfields slum of London in 1888-89. At the time of the murders, rumors abounded of the involvement of a member of the royal family, and of an obscure background of Freemasonic intrigue. The papers of the attending physician of the royal family indicate that he had indeed treated Jack the Ripper. A number of exhaustive studies have concluded that this was Prince Eddy. According to some versions, Prince Eddy had contracted syphilis during a trip to the West Indies during his youth, and this had affected his brain. According to others, Prince Eddy was part of a homosexual clique that killed because they hated women. There is no doubt that Prince Eddy answered to the best available description of the Ripper. Young Prince Eddy conveniently died a few years after the Ripper murders ceased.

A quarter of a century ago, a British physician came forward with evidence supporting the thesis that Jack the Ripper was Prince Eddy. A wire service dispatch from the period sums up the allegations made at that time:

“LONDON, Nov. 1, 1970 (AP) – The Sunday Times expressed belief today that Jack the Ripper, infamous London murderer of nearly 100 years ago, was Edward, Duke of Clarence, grandson of Queen Victoria and older brother of George V. The Times was commenting on the statement of an eminent British surgeon who said that the Ripper ‘was the heir to power and wealth.’ The surgeon, Thomas E.A. Stowell, while claiming to know who the criminal was, refused to identify him in an article to be published tomorrow in The Criminologist…. The Sunday Times, in commenting on Dr. Stowell’s article, said there was one name that fitted his evidence. It said: ‘It is a sensational name: Edward, Duke of Clarence, grandson of Queen Victoria, brother of George V, and heir to the throne of England. All the points of Dr. Stowell’s story fit this man.'” (Spierig, p. 11)

Shortly after having published his article in The Criminologist and thus made his allegations public, Dr. Stowell wrote a letter to the London Times in which he disavowed any intention of identifying Prince Eddy or any other member of the royal family as Jack the Ripper. In this letter Stowell signed himself as “a loyalist and a Royalist.” 

Stowell died mysteriously one day after this letter appeared, and his family promptly burned all his papers.

An American study of the Jack the Ripper mystery was authored by the forensic psychiatrist David Abrahamsen, who sums up his own conclusions as follows: “It is an analysis of the psychological parameters that enabled me to discover that the Ripper murders were perpetrated by Prince Eddy and J.K. Stephen.” (Abrahamsen, pp. 103-104) J.K. Stephen had been chosen as a tutor for Prince Eddy, who was mentally impaired. Stephen was a homosexual. He was the son of the pathological woman-hater Fitzjames Stephen. J.K. Stephen’s uncle was Sir Leslie Stephen, the writer. There is evidence that J.K. Stephen sexually molested his cousin, best known today by her married name, Virginia Woolf, the novelist. This experience may be related to Virginia Woolf’s numerous suicide attempts.

While he was at Cambridge, Prince Eddy was a member of the Apostles secret society. Abrahamsen quotes a maxim of the Apostles: “The love of man for man is greater than that of man for woman, a philosophy known to the Apostles as the higher sodomy.” [p. 123] Prince Eddy died on Jan. 14, 1892. J.K. Stephen died in a sanitarium on Feb. 3, 1892.

Prince Eddy’s younger brother, the later George V, assumed his place in the succession, married Eddy’s former fiancée, Princess May of Teck, and became the father of the Nazi King Edward VIII. If the persistent reports are true, the great-uncle of the current queen was the homicidal maniac Jack the Ripper. Perhaps the recurring dispute about what to call the British royal house – Hanover, Windsor, Guelph, Saxe- Coburg- Gotha, etc. – could be simplified by calling it the House of Jack the Ripper.

Of the existence of a coverup there can be no doubt. One of the main saboteurs of the investigation was a certain Gen. Sir Charles Warren, the chief of the London Metropolitan Police. Warren suppressed evidence, had witnesses intimidated, and was forced to resign amidst a public outcry about Masonic conspiracy. Warren was the master of a new Freemasonic lodge that had recently been created in London. This was the Quatuor Coronati Lodge of Research, number 2076 of the Scottish rite. The Quatuor Coronati [ " Four Crowns* " ] Lodge had been founded in 1884 with a warrant from the Grand Master of British freemasonry, who happened to be Edward VII. "

- Tarpley

* The " Four Crowns " in-question, being - presumably - in 1884 :

•  The King-Emperor of The British Empire

• The Kaiser of Germany

• The Tsar of All the Russias

and, (this last one is slightly more of a guess than the others, but not by much)

• The Hapsberg Emperor of Austro-Hungary

Rule 9 —Thou Shouldst Not Have Been Old Till Thou Hadst Been Wise

Rule #1 :

Stand up straight with your shoulders back

Rule #2 :

Treat yourself like you would someone you are responsible for helping

Rule #3 :

Make friends with people who want the best for you

Rule #4 :

Compare yourself with who you were yesterday, not with who someone else is today

Rule #5 :

Do not let your children do anything that makes you dislike them

Rule #6 :

Set your house in perfect order before you criticise The World

Rule #7 :

Pursue what is meaningful (not what is expedient)

Rule #8 :

Tell The Truth – or, at least, don’t lie.

Rule #9

Assume that the person you are listening to might know something you don’t

Rule #10 :

Be precise in your speech

Rule #11 : 

Do not bother children when they are skate-boarding

Rule #12 :

Pet a cat when you encounter one on the street

" Psychotherapy is not advice. 

Advice is what you get when the person you’re talking with about something horrible and complicated wishes you would just shut up and go away. 

Advice is what you get when the person you are talking to wants to revel in the superiority of his or her own intelligence. If you weren’t so stupid, after all, you wouldn’t have your stupid problems.

Psychotherapy is genuine conversation. Genuine conversation is exploration, articulation and strategizing. When you’re involved in a genuine conversation, you’re listening, and talking—but mostly listening. Listening is paying attention.


It’s amazing what people will tell you if you listen. Sometimes if you listen to people they will even tell you what’s wrong with them. Sometimes they will even tell you how they plan to fix it. Sometimes that helps you fix something wrong with yourself. One surprising time (and this is only one occasion of many when such things happened), I was listening to someone very carefully, and she told me within minutes

(a) that she was a witch and

(b) that her witch coven spent a lot of its time visualizing world peace together.

She was a long-time lower-level functionary in some bureaucratic job.

I would never have guessed that she was a witch.

I also didn’t know that witch covens spent any of their time visualizing World Peace. 

I didn’t know what to make of any of it, either, 

But it wasn’t boring

And that’s something.

David Mills: 

Well, that was money well spent! 

William Somerset: 

He happens to be with The Agency. 

David Mills: 

What, Captain Smelly there? 

CIA Guy: 

[hands over printout] 

Only you I do this for, okay? 

William Somerset:

[back in squad car] 

Say you want to know who's reading Mein Kampf...

WHY?

House of Commons Hansard Debates 

for 9 Jun 1997 (pt 13)

Mr. Tony Benn (Chesterfield): 

I welcome this debate, which takes place in entirely new circumstances. 

I got the feeling that those on both Front Benches were talking as Europeans. 

I, too, was born a European and will die a European. 

It is not really a national matter: we are discussing the future of our continent as we enter the new century. The implications of the decisions that we take are profound constitutionally, politically, economically and socially.

Our cause is not best advanced by talking as though it were a matter of conflict between one nation and another. The history of Europe in this century has been a history of conflict and war arising from nationalism. As I hope to show, if we take the wrong decisions, nationalism could be reawakened.

We have had two wars and the cold war. Fifty years ago, the Marshall plan was designed to strengthen the western European economies. The American ambassador was in the Palace of Westminster the other day and pointed out that the Marshall plan was part of the beginning of globalisation. He said that it was about the containment of communism. The European Economic Community and the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation were set up after the second world war to create a western Europe that would be able to perform again its function as a series of capitalist economies and to resist the onset of communism.

There are many people--I think that the right hon. Member for Old Bexley and Sidcup (Sir E. Heath), who I am sure will be speaking later, is one--who look back at that history and say that we must build a political federation in western Europe to ensure that does not happen again. I understand that view, although I have never shared it, and the right hon. Gentleman, who as a young man went to Spain to visit those engaged in the Spanish civil war and who played a notable part in the war, is fully entitled to it.

I want to express some of my anxieties, which have been rather delicately touched on in the debate so far. First, the Europe that is on offer is a deflationary Europe. That is what the stability pact and the Maastricht criteria are all about. There has been much anxiety in local government about the standard spending assessment limiting the capacity of local authorities to spend, but I dread the day when the Chancellor comes to the House and says that a standard spending assessment has been made for Britain and that if we go beyond it we shall be fined under the provisions of the stability pact.

Unemployment in Europe, at 18 million or 20 million, is at an horrific level. It is all very well blaming the continental Governments' policies, but unemployment performs an essential function if we want to achieve what are called flexible labour markets. Without unemployment, wages cannot be brought down. Unemployment gets wages down. If wages are brought down, profits go up and imports are limited. In my opinion, the discipline of unemployment is an integral part of the policy being pursued in the European Community.

I am old enough to remember that Hitler came to power when there were 6 million unemployed in Germany. As a 10-year-old, I bought "Mein Kampf"; I have it on my bookshelf still. The problem is beginning to re-emerge with Le Pen in France. With mass unemployment and despair, it is easy to find scapegoats: the Jews, the communists, the trade unionists. To read what was said by the Nazis before the war and consider how it is being echoed today must make people worry about what is in

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effect the reimposition of the gold standard in Europe in the name of economic stability. The social price is very high.

My second anxiety is that the whole business--to call it a legal personality is only a way of describing it--involves the transfer of power from the people to Governments. That is what it is about. There is a new political class in Europe that has been accumulating, in the name of the European Union, more and more power for itself. I sat on the Council of Ministers for four years. I was president of the Council of Energy Ministers. The laws in Europe are made by a Parliament that meets in secret. When I was made president, I wrote to all the member countries saying that as we were a Parliament that passed laws, we should have it open so that everyone could hear the debates. That was vetoed; they want to meet in secret. In secret, the negotiations and deals can be made more easily. If the press had been present, as Hansard is here, a very different perspective would have been seen.

I do not draw a direct parallel, but it has sometimes occurred to me that as communism required a party central committee and commissars, Europe has a central bank and Commissioners. Both have a certain distrust of the exercise of popular power because they pursue in the one case a communist philosophy, and in the other a very ideological free-market philosophy, that require the people to be kept at bay.

We are now discussing also something as important as the Scottish Parliament and the Welsh Assembly, but these other constitutional changes that the Government are contemplating, which I wholly support, involve the transfer of power from London to Edinburgh and Cardiff at the very moment that we are also discussing the transfer of more essential powers from London to Frankfurt, Brussels and Strasbourg.

One reason why I am not in any way nationalist in my approach is that if the single currency goes ahead, power will be transferred to a central bank that will exercise all the levers of power in economic policy. It is no secret that I have some anxieties about the transfer of power to the Bank of England, but at least I have the comfort that the House of Commons can take it back again. In 1946, the Bank of England Act was passed by a majority in the House of Commons. After that, the Bank became subject to Treasury control. If it can go once, it can come back again; but hand power to Frankfurt and it cannot be retained.

If one thing is sacred for me, as I have said time and again, it is the power of the people by using a pencil on a piece of paper to remove those who made the economic policy that determined their lives. It never ceases to amaze me that people without a policeman in sight can take a pencil, put a cross on a piece of paper, pop it in a box and get rid of a Government: whether the last Government, the Callaghan Government, the Wilson Government or the Churchill Government. That is what democracy is about. Transfer the key decisions to people whom we do not elect and cannot remove and we abandon centuries of struggle by the common people to have some say in determining their future.

One last aspect was not touched on by the Foreign Secretary, but I must mention it: the lunacy of extending NATO into eastern Europe and rearming Hungary,

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Poland and the Czech Republic. If the history of this century shows one thing, it is that we do not need rearmament in central and eastern Europe. Think of the people we have rearmed at different times for different reasons. We armed Serbia because Tito was hostile to Stalin; look at the price that was paid in the break-up of Yugoslavia. It is beyond the range of common sense when Europe's problems are so enormous, and when we need jobs and health facilities, to launch an arms drive to re-equip the Poles, Czechs and Hungarians.

I mention that because under our constitution--happily, we are looking at it; I have been interested in constitutional reform for a very long time--the power to extend NATO was taken by royal prerogative. Parliament was never consulted because all foreign relations are dealt with by the prerogative of treaty making. To put it as quietly as I can, I am worried about a deflationary Europe, a centralised Europe, an anti-democratic Europe and a rearmed Europe. Those anxieties in no way relate to Euro-scepticism because if we get it wrong, it will affect every country, not just Britain. It will take away democracy from Germany, France, Italy and the rest.

One reason why this debate is important is that it comes during the aftermath of some important elections. The British general election saw a major landslide which, dare I say it without being confrontational, rejected the policies of the previous Government. I put it no stronger than that. It appeared that those policies did not find favour with the electorate. I do not know whether to describe the French elections as an "old Labour" victory because that might get me into trouble with Excalibur. Lionel Jospin won an election on the basis of creating 750,000 new jobs and a shorter working week. In every country in Europe, people want jobs, full employment--what is wrong with that as an objective rather than a bit of modernisation of skills and training?--a living wage, homes to live in, lifelong health care and education, dignity when they are old, and peace. That is the voice of Europe that we heard on 1 May and in the French election.

We should seek a Europe in which we co-operate without coercion. I have presented to the House twice before, and may again, a Bill that would make it possible for the 47 countries in our continent to co-operate. All the arguments about pollution and the dangers of fraud could be dealt with as well by co-operation as by coercion. It is the fear of failure that concerns me. If this scheme fails, the result will be a recrudescence of nationalism. It is already beginning. The Sun had a headline, "Up Yours Delors", a typical Murdoch insult. The problem was not Delors, whom I have known for a long time, or his nationality; it was that the system was wrong. How easy for some editor to turn that into hostility to Germany, France, Spain and Italy when their people suffer from the same problems as we do.

I believe, and I have said it so many times in the House that no one will be surprised, that this is a supremely democratic question. It is about whether the people of Britain, France, Germany and Spain are to be allowed, through their domestic democracies, to get rid of the people who control them. That is not possible within the framework of a politically driven federal Europe. It is not about economics; it is politically motivated. I understand and respect that, but I know it. If that ability were lost, I believe that we would have thrown away centuries of history.

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I recognise that these issues divide everyone. It would be a mistake to suppose that the matter could be fitted neatly into party loyalties; the evidence shows that it cannot. When we vote on the matter in the House of Commons, there will, however one puts it, be a free vote. There will then be a free vote in the referendum on the matter. I beg the House not to see the matter, as it so often has in the past, as a choice between those who are pro or anti Europe. It is about democracy or dictatorship. I do not mean dictatorship in its more elaborate and terrifying forms but the right to govern ourselves.

Julius Caesar arrived in 55 BC with a single currency; we still use it. It took Boadicea, the original iron lady, to raise the men of Essex, known then as the Iceni, to fight the seventh legion to try to contain it. That is not the approach that we should take. We should try to ensure that the people of Europe control their own future. Mistakes will be made by any Government; if we cannot correct mistakes through the ballot box, we will have thrown away everything that matters, including all the ideas that have led to the creation of this House and of our democracy in Britain.