Despite a valiant rejection of the Lisbon Treaty by the Irish last year in the face of overwhelming opposition from their entire political class, the media and big business, the nation that once sought independence from British rule has been bullied into accepting rule from distant Brussels.

Only Poland and the Czech Republic have yet to ratify the Lisbon Treaty, and it will likely not be long before they do. As the Czech President Vaclav Klaus sadly noted to waiting journalists:

The Irish had the last chance to say something about Lisbon… because after today’s Irish referendum there will never be another referendum in Europe.

And slowly but surely, as day turns to night, the EU’s slow motion coup d’état takes effect. Our sovereignty has been strangled, our independence dissolved. Squandered are centuries of hard won liberties, rights and freedoms – so often without our knowledge or even a care. It is, as Hugh Gaitskell so accurately predicted, to be the end of a thousand years of history.

Yet, there is hope. We, as a nation, are still capable of saving ourselves from the jaws of defeat as we have so many times before. Perhaps it will be that resilience of character and spirit that sees us through again – but only if we will it to be so. For there will be no-one else behind us to catch us should we falter or fall; no foreign intervention to rescue us from our fate.

That decision is up to us now. Either we wake from our delusions of a benevolent European Union, realise that our future as a truly democratic nation lies in grave danger, and resolve to act – or we slowly subside into bureaucracy, and foreign rule by an unelected state, a fate for which we will only have ourselves to blame.

Mr Purnell called for the resignation of Gordon Brown as Labour Party leader and Prime Minister and for an immediate election contest to replace him. Yet, like so many other Labour rebels who have taken to the airwaves in recent days, Mr Purnell did not cite a disagreement with the policies of Mr Brown.

It is the case that Mr Purnell and all the other Labour rebels do not actually have any problems with the current policies of the Labour Party. They merely disagree with the way in which they are being presented and the negative light that the media now continually cast upon Gordon Brown and the Labour Party.

Thus, this is not an issue of policy but personality and rather blatant careerism. Sky News claimed tonight that in resigning Mr Purnell sacrificed his career on principle. Rubbish. James Purnell had only his career in mind and believes that, by ditching Brown, he could further it. Similarly, to which principles exactly was he adhering? Certainly not those of policy or ideology.

Furthermore, if you honestly think that a UK General Election will change anything other than the personalities of those MPs in Westminster and Whitehall then you are sadly mistaken. Mr Cameron and the Conservatives seek to continue the policies and political direction of the current Government with only very minor alterations. If you do not believe this to be true then please prove my assertion to be incorrect with cold hard evidence. If you cannot then you must accept that I am right.

It does not matter whether or not Gordon Brown is replaced as Prime Minister by another Labour leader or by the Conservative Party and David Cameron; the governance and policies in Westminster will remain identical for the foreseeable future, as they have done for the past two decades. Nothing will change.

For having the audacity to stand up for her beliefs and probably those of millions more then she has come under intense and personal criticism from the Left – and for this at least she deserves acknowledgement.

Yet, I do find her rather annoying. Despite her brave, if at times ignorant, stand on traditionalist issues such as abortion, at times she lacks a sense of credibility. Perhaps the attacks by the Left really are hitting home, or perhaps it is because when she gets things wrong it is arguably in spectacular fashion. Who knows?

On her blog last night, Ms Dorries did nothing at all to alleviate these concerns of mine. Quite openly she cited ‘rumours’ from a close yet unnamed source who suggested that the MPs expenses scandal may have been created and exploited by the apparently ‘fiercely eurosceptic’ Barclay Brothers, who have since 2004 been the multi-billionaire owners of the Telegraph newspaper group.

Nadine went on to declare that she agreed with her source who said the Barclay Brothers wish to destabilise Parliament and allow anti-EU parties to gain votes at the European elections because the Conservative Party are not ‘eurosceptic’ enough. Yet, if she really believed the Barclay Brothers were conspiring against MPs then she should have said so rather than using weasel words.

What’s more, the recent MP allowances scandal is collectively the responsibility of all Members of Parliament. Nobody forced MPs to claim their allowance in full. So when Labour MP, Stephen Pound, claimed that Parliamentary staff ‘used to ring people and say you’re under claiming this month’, and that, ‘in reality they were helping us over the cliff’, this was still absolutely no excuse.

Furthermore, of course the Conservative Party is not eurosceptic enough – but then, these days, euroscepticism doesn’t mean anything anymore anyway. You either leave the EU or remain in it and run by it – there is no in between. However, whether that is the view of the Barclay Brothers is debatable. They have never done much to give me the impression they favour EU withdrawal.

However, there is indeed deception at work, and like Ms Dorries I do not find it particularly unlikely that:

This is all a power game … the British public are being worked like puppets by two very powerful men. Whipped up into a frenzy to achieve exactly what they want.

As I did previously remark, something similar happened in 1997 when the media collectively grouped together to help remove the Conservative administration under John Major. Something similar is beginning to happen again, the result of which will mean that important political issues won’t be discussed (or even aired) and as a consequence no honest political choice will be given to the electorate come the General Election next year.

Despite Cameron and the Conservative Party being equally guilty and complicit in the recent expenses scandal (manufactured or otherwise), the media has sought to portray the Conservative Party as setting the agenda on Parliamentary expenses (which it has not done). This is so that the furore may be used as a mechanism to allow the Conservatives back into office without proper scrutiny of their policies or those of Government.

We are entering very dangerous territory and our entire British political system faces an enormous challenge. Under the cover of darkness that this scandal has cast across Westminster and engulfed the media, our Government, with the willing compliance of the opposition, are seeking to force through yet further radical constitutional reform. Melanie Phillips in the Spectator argues:

The last thing that should happen is for Parliament to be made even weaker. Yet MPs are apparently themselves doing just that by agreeing to have their financial arrangements removed from Parliamentary control and given to an outside body. But this undermines a key principle of our Parliamentary democracy that Parliament is sovereign and no-one tells it what to do.

As Dr Richard North had previously remarked – this scandal is a symptom, not the cause of our wider problem. That problem is the constitutional crisis we are now facing which has been mainly brought about by successive Governments and Parliaments who have helped to whittle away our democratic powers and right to self-government. The result has been a public left bewildered and angered by handsome perks for MPs who are not doing their job.

In this way, Nadine Dorries redeemed herself this morning when she rightly remarked that the real fault lies with successive Governments and their Prime Ministers, who have never had the courage publicly to address the issue of MPs’ salaries and their worth. The currently proposed reforms will go no way towards assessing that worth either. One or two MPs might ceremonially be thrown under the bus by their leaders to save the rest, but, fundamentally, nothing much will change at all.

We cannot continue to blithely ignore the overriding issue of sovereignty. Unless our Parliament as an institution is rebuilt and strengthened against the power of Government then it shall remain meaningless and verbose, and these types of financial and political scandal will only perpetuate.

He disagreed with Lord Tebbit, Peter Hitchens and that anarchical prat, Paul Staines who called for the electorate to ditch their support for the main political parties as a means of registering their disgust and disapproval over MPs handling of our country and parliamentary expenses.

Conversely, Tim claimed that a large victory for the Conservative Party would accelerate momentum towards the end of the Blair and Brown years. He also commented that Cameron had acted decisively and with resolution over the MPs expenses scandal, and that the formation of a new Conservative-led coalition in the European Parliament would act as a serious opposition.

The other few reasons he gave amounted to little more than a ‘vote for us because the rest are worse’ – and there really is little merit in that line of persuasion. In fact, let us be honest, there really was little in the way of merit in any of his arguments at all.

For example, how exactly will a large vote for the Conservative Party at the European and local elections hasten the end of the Brown and Blair years? Since David Cameron, the self-proclaimed ‘Heir to Blair’, and the Conservative Party are pursuing policies that are virtually identical to that of New Labour, how is voting Conservative meant to be end the Brown and Blair years when politically they seek to continue them in terms of policy?

Furthermore, how exactly did David Cameron act with ‘resolution’ over MPs expenses? Like so many other MPs he too was caught with his hand in the jar, and he had never seriously complained about the purposefully deceptive system of expenses before.

Did Mr Cameron actually sack anyone that mattered or was not in a minor role? No. He simply asked Conservative MPs (and himself) to pay back the money they had immorally taken. This ‘pay it back and we’ll all just forget about it’ attitude is not what I would call ‘acting with resolution’ at all, despite what the media may say.

Finally, you cannot create any real opposition to the European project in the EU Parliament. It is the EU Commission that acts as the Executive and produces legislation. The Executive are not drawn from Parliament and therefore the EU Parliament cannot repeal EU laws or create them – only agree or disagree.

Thus MEPs and parties cannot fulfil their manifesto commitments because they do not have power or authority to execute their mandate. Therefore, having more Conservative MEPs in the EU Parliament arguing for ‘a freer and more decentralised Europe’ will not make the blindest bit of difference to the make-up of the EU. You cannot initiate real change from within the Parliament.

The Conservatives as a whole are not particularly interested in the issue of European Union any more. David Cameron has used the European elections campaign as a platform for national issues including calling for an immediate General Election and his attempted cover up of the MPs expenses scandal, rather than to discuss the Lisbon Treaty or loss of sovereignty to the EU. As Lord Tebbit suggests, do they really deserve our vote?

At the moment it would appear that the BNP are on course to win as many as six seats in the EU Parliament, meaning that they will receive all manner of EU political funding, not to mention high salaries for its MEPs which they could divert towards supporting the BNP party machine.

On his blog, Tony Sharp summed up what is probably the general attitude of Conservative Party members in a posting in which he argued that it was ‘idiotic’ of MacShane in attempting to lay the blame of any increase in the BNP vote at the Conservatives’ door. However, I disagree with Tony. An increase in the BNP vote is as much the fault of the Conservatives as it is of the Labour Party.

Members of the electorate who are moving across from Labour (or the Conservatives) to vote BNP are not just interested in ‘big government and more state control’ as Tony says, but a whole host of other issues including crime, immigration, and the EU – none of which the main parties are speaking up about.

If the Conservatives were actually seen by the electorate to have coherent and plausible policies on immigration, crime and the EU (and others) then it is likely that they might gain from the Labour exodus of votes. However, the party does not have credible alternative policies and sections of the electorate have largely realised that in practical terms the two main parties are identical.

Therefore, to the electorate the Conservative Party and Labour represent two tarnished sides of the same dull coin. Neither party will speak out on the issues that are actually important to many people, thereby driving them into the arms of the BNP as a means by which the electorate will attempt to protest.

I will agree with Tony Sharp that the British National Party and the Labour Party are ‘socialist’ outfits and not conservative at all. However, the Conservative Party are not a conservative party either, are they? They have increasingly signed up to the political agenda of the Left on almost every conceivable issue under David Cameron in order to get back into office but not power. Find me a fundamental difference between the current Labour Party and the Conservative Party and I will show you a talking dog.

What is more, it’s been both the Conservatives and Labour who have, over the course of decades, signed Britain away to the European Union – not just the Labour party as Tony says. If the Conservatives were prepared to admit they were actually wrong about this transfer of power and sovereignty to the EU then that would be a start – but, of course, they have not admitted that at all and are still very much in favour of Britain being in the EU (and therefore being run by the EU). No change there then.

To blame the rise of the racist BNP on any one party is entirely wrong. The Conservatives, Labour Party and Liberal Democrats all share responsibility, whether they like it or not. We too, as citizens, must play our part. If we fail to engage in the political system and to hold our politicians to account through inaction then we are forfeiting our right to complain about the results.

While both scandals undoubtedly serve to remind us and the electorate of how out of touch the political class are with the rest of the country – both morally and politically – this cannot, I think, necessarily be seen as entirely desirable.

In the few years leading up to the 1997 General Election, the Conservative Government of John Major was engulfed in scandal after scandal involving the sleazy activities of Tory backbenchers and Ministers. The bedroom antics and financial misdoings of MPs whom nobody had heard of previously were suddenly splashed all over the front pages of the daily newspapers.

It would be fair to say that all Governments who have been in office for any considerable length of time are susceptible to these scandals. This does not, of course, make it right that they should have been carried out by the individuals in question, but simply to say that such human and political failings will almost certainly happen under any Government of any party given enough time.

As it happens, the supposedly ‘whiter than white’ Labour party that followed the Conservative implosion and electoral landslide of 1997 was swiftly involved in its own set of financial and sexual scandals, with Robin Cook choosing to sack his wife at the airport after a phone call with Blair and later marrying his mistress, while Peter Mandelson was caught up in the Hinduja passport row.

Yet, with a change of Government, very little by comparison was made of these similar scandals in the mainstream media, and sleaze suddenly became politically unimportant again (to most journalists at least). This therefore suggests that sleaze only seems to matter when a Government is perceived to be doing a bad job. This was the case in the mid-nineties under John Major and is equally so now under the tenure of Gordon Brown.

However, more importantly, the cry of sleaze levelled at individual MPs and Governments can be used by the media as a means by which to allow the political opposition into office without ever having subjected them to reasoned or thorough scrutiny of policy.

In short it is an unreasoned, mindless frenzy. It happened in 1997 with very little public scrutiny of Labour’s policies under the leadership of Tony Blair, and it appears that something similar is happening again with the Labour Government and our Tory opposition under David Cameron. The effect will be that ‘real’ political issues will not be discussed (or often even aired) and that as a consequence no honest political choice will be given to the electorate – they will simply be voting on personalities.

Labour backbencher, John McDonnell, and Shadow Foreign Secretary, William Hague, call for a swift inquiry into the email leaks and those responsible for the digital comments. The end of the world as we know it beckons.

Who actually cares? Certainly not me, though it seems that the usual suspects in the media and in the blogosphere have worked themselves up into a mad feeding frenzy over what amounts to be nothing more than a complete non-issue.

Nobody living outside the Westminster bubble actually cares at all either. Real people with real jobs and families are either too busy dealing with their own financial problems, as our economy falls into the worst recession for decades, or worrying about more important issues from health to immigration. Perhaps this is why the British National party are rapidly gaining traction in local elections at the expense of all the main parties?

In fact, this whole rather sad episode played out in Westminster just goes to further highlight how completely out of touch our political class have become. They’ve made more fuss over a few pathetic emails than they have over many, many other issues which are actually important to the electorate. This will only serve to drive yet more voters into the arms of the racist BNP.

The BBC is reporting that the Liberal Democrats are going to drop their pledge to cut the overall level of tax at the next election. This, I think, is significant because it now means that none of three major political parties in Britain will be promising to reduce the increasingly crushing burden of taxation placed upon the British electorate at the election next year.

Our political class from all parties have conspired to remove any semblance of electoral choice over this highly important issue. If you believe that the tax burden should be cut, as millions of British voters do, then you are now left completely unrepresented by any political party that has a chance of forming a Government.

Furthermore, the usual excuses that party spokesman predictably parrot about how cuts in taxation are somehow ‘implausible’ or ‘irrational’ during the current economic climate are left completely uncontested. They never explain why such high levels of taxation are ‘rational’ or why it is right that the Government and state should waste so much of our income on frivolous pursuits and egotistical political projects.

The real reason why none of our political class will advocate any other alternative to what already appears to be the status quo is that they either genuinely support ever higher levels of stifling taxation, or that they have become so intellectually lazy that they have chosen not to make the case for a less expensive state.

When politics has been reduced by the political and media class to being about personalities rather than policies, should we really expect any different? Once again we have been given no choice.