A warning to America: the apotheosis of the anti-democratic European Socialist quangocrat

Such protected spheres of influence provide an unprecedented breeding ground for the political class. There is now a well-trodden career path from the politicized NGOs of the left, via the left-leaning quangos, to high office in the Labour Party and thence to the lucrative bureaucracies of the European Union. The Parliamentary Labour Party now consists almost entirely of career politicians who have spent their lives spending other people's money and providing ideological reasons for stealing more of it.

An astonishing example is Baroness Ashton, the first ever "foreign minister" of the European Union -- and therefore my foreign minister, who negotiates on my behalf with all the governments of the world.

I know a lot about Baroness Ashton's career. But I don't know anything else about her other than that she is having to learn French for the first time. When our country had control of its foreign relations, a knowledge of French was the first requirement for any position in foreign affairs. Now, it seems, you can reach the very summit of European politics with no qualifications at all. Lady Ashton began as a secretary in the most destructive of all the left-wing NGOS, the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, a KGB-funded pressure group that nearly succeeded in preventing the deployment of cruise missiles in Britain, at a time of real and pressing Soviet threat. She moved to the "Central Council for Education and Training in Social Work," a leftist quango devoted to the maintenance of the welfare state's most hopeless victims. From there she moved smoothly to the National Health Service, became chair of the Health Authority in Hertfordshire, and was finally appointed vice president of the National Council for One Parent Families. She entered the House of Lords at the behest of Tony Blair, and in accordance with his policy of filling the upper house with leftist apparatchiks. She became a European Commissioner by appointment, the choice being Gordon Brown's, and foreign minister likewise, as a result of a deal worked out by the European political elite. Never once has this woman ventured to propose herself for election to anything. Instead she has been carried from office to office by a class whose interests she can be guaranteed to represent, and whose agenda she will never question.

Scruton goes on to praise 'our bravest member of the European Parliament, the English* conservative Daniel Hannan', and to recommend the latter's latest book, The New Road to Serfdom, in the strongest possible terms. He suggests Hannan's 'letter of warning to America' should be on sale at every Tea Party. He's quite Right, of course.

Sound fellows, Scruton and Hannan. Between them, they keep my fading hope alive.

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* Nice one, Roger.