FOREIGN courts are increasingly imposing their wills on the Houses of Parliament.

It’s as if we are being deliberately goaded to either rebel or conform.

Votes for prisoners, appeals by paedophiles, the outlawing of gender ‘discrimination’ by insurance companies… these are just a handful of the directives from the European Union human rights industry so far this year and I’m afraid it’s just the tip of an undemocratic iceberg.

Then I turn on the television only to see yet another pathetic, tame ‘journalist’ carefully omitting to broach the most crucial question of all. Which is… just how do we, the British people, feel about having laws made by an unelected, unaccountable judiciary in Strasbourg?

It beggars belief that we have come to this. Do we value our freedoms so little, is so great our disdain for those who suffered in order that we could live in freedom?

There is now a routine assumption that this country will leap to attention whenever a directive is issued from the well-upholstered seats of power across the Channel.

Eighty-five per cent of our laws are now made outside this country. So where are the protests? Does the notion of self-determination have no meaning, no resonance or value?

I cannot decide whether the deafening silence is down to ignorance, inertia, ambivalence or plain weariness with the whole thing. Perhaps the vast majority of the population are extremely happy with being a colony on the edge of a new empire.

Two thousand years ago, all roads led to Rome. Now they fan out from Brussels, tentacles that reach from Ireland to the borders of Russia.

Now here’s a thought. If at some stage in the future we enter a trading agreement with, say, China, and that led eventually to an EU-style arrangement, would it then be all right if that country also ultimately started passing laws that governed British people?

You might say such a proposition was ridiculous. But there again, that was precisely how the Common Market started… as a trading agreement.