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I am no gardener, it has never been my “thing” but my Parents always enjoyed it. In the three and a half years since moving down to Somerset, I have trimmed and pruned as the seasons required but unfortunately, given my Mother’s total lack of organisation – find a space and fill it regardless, the whole garden needs to be totally re-engineering. Spaces need to be defined and allocated in short, I need to build a new garden !

This weekend with the help of a couple of good chaps, a new fence was put across the bottom of the garden because the existing one was rotten. It is amazing the difference defining clear boundaries and edges has, you have something to work from and it becomes easier to organise and define the internal spaces, you can see clearly what you are doing and where you are going.

Both in the Balkans and Iraq, civil war was accompanied by “ethnic cleansing”, minority creeds and religions from one area being displaced and driven to live in another. However horrible and brutal, this is sadly a natural consequence of internal political divisions that spill over into bloodshed and was as true in Northern Ireland over many generations. Mixed societies can only live in peace and side by side when there is a belief in the fairness of the Law and in the impartiality of its administration, any hint of a bias to one community or another, guarantees division and worse.

This Thursday either Gordon Brown or glove puppet Miliband, will sign the European Constitution on behalf of the UK, I have little problem with that, let those EU members who want to become a European Federal Republic, do so although most don’t. Gordon Brown is foolish and politically naïve not to use this to help his domestic position by calling a Referendum on it which was promised in the last Manifesto and in part therefore, is the basis of Labour being the Government. It is grossly insulting for Brown to prattle on about his “Red Lines” and it all being different when it is obviously identical in all respects except a flag and the odd title.

That we in the UK should have constant problems with the EU is obvious because culturally and politically, we are totally different from all our “European Partners” in every respect. However, we are not alone because right across the EU with very few exceptions countries, even France and Germany, are starting to have problems with the way the EU is run. The worm at the heart of the EU is its democratic deficit and the fact that when it comes to anything the EU does, the voters of every EU country have been totally disenfranchised and are powerless to influence, let alone change anything they disagree with. For example if it was decided by some EU official that in order to help the pig farmers, the eating of pork was compulsory, Jews and Muslims would be powerless to oppose such a “Law”.

The problem with the EU and the people who run it is that they acknowledge no boundaries to their powers and the move to majority voting is the proof itself, designed wholly to isolate opposition to any measure they decide upon – divide and conquer, then rule. With an ageing population and through unaffordable socialist policies, the general European economic landscape is one of decline in the face of the economic power of China and India. Under such circumstances and never far from the surface, the forces of nationalism flourish and when that happens in continental Europe, war is never that far behind.

The EU has never understood that in order to be successful, it needed to recognise boundaries and limits to its actions, defer to the democratically elected national Governments however “inconvenient” this may be to the Brussels Elite. Instead it sees none and this is highly dangerous because it assumes a “Divine Right” to rule us all. It has long since assumed the powers of a sovereign Government but has never faced an election yet, national and democratically elected Governments are treated as servants and their Parliaments relegated to little more than Town Halls. As in previous generations, it will fall to us Britons to save Europe from the inevitable tensions and unrest generated by the inevitable implosion of the EU. Forget all the “At the Heart of Europe” stuff, it doesn’t work, we need to walk away and strengthen ourselves before once again dark clouds gather over the Continent and we are called to arms but hopefully this time, more Field of the Cloth of Gold than D-Day.