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Angela Merkel has described the crisis of 2020 as the worst the EU has ever known. Yet the EU has responded by showing its essential weakness. In practice it should have had a coordinated comprehensive and flexible emergency plan. Whether the desiccated neo-liberal structures of the EU can do anything of this kind is doubtful. The resistance to fiscal sharing by northern European countries such as Germany and The Netherlands may block the way to rescuing Italy; a country too big to be crushed like Greece but also possibly too costly to save.
Newly updated by its co-author Richard North, and building on the work he did with the late Christopher Booker, The Great Deception is of the utmost importance today as it was when it was first published. Can the European project survive the COVID-19 crisis and the recession that may well follow? This book seeks to answer that question.
The Great Deception tells for the first time the inside story of the most audacious political project of modern times: the plan to unite Europe under a single 'supranational' government. From the 1920s, when the blueprint for the European Union was first conceived by a British civil servant, this meticulously documented account takes the story right up to the moves to give Europe a political constitution, already planned 60 years ago to be the 'crowning dream' of the whole project.
The book chillingly shows how Britain's politicians, not least Tony Blair, were consistently outplayed in a game the rules of which they never understood. But it ends by asking whether, from the euro to enlargement, the 'project' has now overreached itself, as a gamble doomed to fail.
Since their collaboration began in 1992, Christopher Booker, the late Sunday Telegraph columnist, and Richard North, who worked for four years in Brussels and Strasbourg as a senior researcher, built a unique reputation for their expertise on Britain's relationship to the European Union. Their previous publications included The Mad Officials (1994) and The Castle of Lies (1996).
