Book Review: A Doomed Marriage - Britain and Europe: Hannan is right that systems that have lost their inner spirit are subject to collapse at any time. The EU is now the victim of its own favoured metaphor about being a bicycle going ever forward: it isn’t going forward any more, so it is wobbling, and may soon fall over. The author is wonderful, too, about the power of EU bureaucracy and its largely successful attempt to frustrate democracy and buy up interest groups. When the European Constitution was first advanced, the EU institutions announced that 200 “civil society” organisations were to be involved in the consultations. Hannan discovered that every single one of these received EU grants.

(Dr. Benny Peiser)