Last week the Irish voted "yes" to the Lisbon treaty, just under a year and a half after rejecting it the first time round. In case you've never heard of it, the Lisbon treaty marks an important milestone in the history of the European Union. Once it has been ratified by all 27 EU member states, it will give the EU legal status and a permanent president and foreign minister. (At the time of writing this hub, only Poland and the Czech Republic have not yet ratified the treaty.)

There is very little in-depth discussion of the EU in Britain's media. Since Britain joined in the early 1970s, there have been occasional murmurings in the tabloids about EU directives specifying the precise bendiness of cucumbers or British consumers having to buy things in metric quantities rather than Imperial, but for the most part, the EU is not criticised or even talked about much by the "quality" press.

For a long time I have had a feeling of disquiet about the European Union. This partly stems from the disconnect between what it's always said it represented (free trade) and what it actually does, i.e. impose heavy regulation on trade, most notably in the case of farmers and fishermen. Fishermen must meet strict quotas and have to throw dead fish back into the sea if it's not one of the species on the quota list. And under the Common Agricultural Policy farmers are given subsidies, enabling their produce to be "dumped" on the Third World, with disastrous effects for their economies.

Recently I searched the Internet for a readable, concise book about the way that the EU has affected our lives, and what lies in store for the future. When I came across a book entitled The End of the English, I was intrigued. Would it be worth recommending to anyone else out there who finds all the talk of treaties and ratification rather dry and dull, and wants to find out more?

When it comes to readability and conciseness, The End of the English certainly ticks both boxes. Author David Brown has chosen to write from the point of view of a grandfather addressing his grandchildren. He talks about the EU's origins and its evolution from the "Common Market" via the "European Economic Community" to the EU of today, as well as the outright deceptions that were practised in order to get the British people to vote yes to joining back in 1973.

The chapter entitled "Resultant Lunacies" describes the stupidity of some EU regulations, the total number of which is well into six figures (according to the House of Commons' own research, over 130,000 new pieces of EU legislation were adopted by the UK between 1980 and 2006). Some EU regulations are comical in their effect (like the woman who cooked for a local pub and called one of her dishes "Red Dragon Pie" because it was supposed to give you the strength of a dragon. A trading standards officer called and told her that she couldn't call them by this name unless they contained real dragons). But most of the regulations described in the book have serious implications, particularly for small businesses, which cannot afford to comply with them.

Subsequent chapters explain the complaisance of the media (did you know that one arm of the BBC recently accepted a £25M loan from the EU's European Investment Bank?), and the implications of forthcoming developments in the EU for personal freedom. One such development is Corpus Juris, the system of justice that will be imposed over the whole EU. Under this system the European Public Prosecutor will have the power to "make requests for a person's remand in custody. . .for a period of up to 6 months, renewable for 3 months, where there are reasonable grounds to suspect that the accused has committed one of the offences defined above, or good reasons for believing it necessary to stop him committing such an offence. . ." What this means in plain English is that it will be possible to arrest someone and imprison them indefinitely without charge. Goodbye, habeas corpus. What's more Europol, the European police force, has complete immunity from prosecution. There is much more in this section of the book, but I think this gives you a flavour.  (Go here for a brief description of Corpus Juris.)

In the final section he mentions the comments of former dissident Vladimir Bukovsky, who has made telling comparisons between the EU and the old Soviet Union, namely the lack of accountability at the very top and the use of secrecy and doublethink. (Go here to see an interview with Mr Bukovsky. It's essential reading, IMO.)

If I were to offer any criticisms of this book, I would say that it could use the services of a good editor, both to clear up any spelling/grammatical errors (of which there are a number), and to tidy up the structure. Given the complexity of the subject matter I also feel that it would benefit from the use of visuals, such as timelines and charts/tables; the latter would have been very useful for explaining the EU's structure and institutions. As it is, Brown has simply given us a rather garbled list - you can find much better explanations simply by typing _eu structure_ into a search engine. Other minor quibbles include the absence of a glossary and the omission of certain things from the index. But if you're looking for something you can read in an afternoon and which explains the basics, then this book is a good place to start.

© M. Ibbotson October 2009

The End of the English is published by June Press, price £6.99 + p&p (ISBN: 978-0-9534697-6-5)