I thought that, after eight years in the European Parliament, nothing could shock me any more. I was wrong.

Yesterday, the President of the Parliament, Hans-Gert Pöttering, asked for, and was granted, arbitrary powers to suspend the rules of the institution in order to disadvantage the tiny number of MEPs who want a referendum on the European Constitution Lisbon Treaty.

I have come to expect hypersensitivity to criticism, flouting of rules, intolerance of dissent, authoritarianism. But nothing had prepared me for such blatancy.

Hans-Gert openly admitted that the behaviour of his Euro-sceptic opponents was within the rules. And he wasn't asking to change those rules - a procedure that would take time. No, he simply wanted permission to disregard them. Permission was duly granted, by 20 committee votes to 3.

Hans-Gert's letter is worth quoting in full:

 Dear Mr Leinen, [Jo Leinen, a German Socialist, is Chairman of the Constitutional Affairs Committee]

 In the course of the current part session, Parliament was confronted on several occasions with procedural requests which were formally based on and fulfilled the requirements of a provision of the Rules of Procedure, but which according to the full conviction of myself and of other Members of the House were moved with the intention of obstructing the procedures of the House.

 I take the view that my overall responsibility for the implementation of the Rules of Procedure and the powers conferred on me by Rule 19 include the power not to allow such practices.

 I should therefore be grateful if, pursuant to Rule 201(1), you could submit to the Committee on Constitutional Affairs the following question for urgent consideration:

 'Can Rule 19(1) be interpreted as meaning that the powers conferred by this Rule include the power to call an end to excessive use of motions such as points of order, procedural motions, explanations of vote and excessive, indiscriminate requests for separate, split or roll call votes where these appear to the President to be aimed at deliberately disrupting the procedures of the House or the rights of other Members.'

 I would appreciate it if I could have your Committee's interpretation before the opening of the next part session.

I haven't made this up: you can see a copy of the original letter over at England Expects.

Re-read the letter slowly. Hans-Gert accepts that our demands for electronic votes and for the right to explain how we voted were perfectly legal. But he does not ask for the rules to be changed. He asks for the right to ignore them at his own discretion - that is, to ignore such requests when they come from Euro-sceptics.

His fig-leaf - more of a strawberry-leaf, really - is Rule 19 (1). This, too, is worth quoting:

"The President shall direct all the activities of the Parliament and its bodies under the conditions laid down in these Rules. He shall enjoy all the powers necessary to preside over the proceedings of Parliament and to ensure that they are properly conducted." (Emphasis added)

In other words, the President is bound by Rule 19 to uphold the Rules of Procedure, not allowed to set them aside as he pleases.

The whole business is outrageous. I am almost tempted to compare it to the Nazi Ermächtigungsgesetz - the Enabling Act of 1933 which allowed Hitler to override parliament and the constitution. But I won't because a) it would be disproportionate and b) it would be terrifically rude to Hans-Gert, who lost his father in the war and who, for all that he is behaving appallingly on this occasion, is a decent man and a democrat. Which is why I am so disappointed in him. He, of all people, should be alive to the dangers of assuming discretionary powers in order to bulldozer the law.

Let me instead quote the grand-daddy of British resistance against Euro-totalitarianism, Edmund Burke. What most bothered him about the French Revolution, more than its republicanism, its atheism, its threat to the peace of Europe, was that it owned itself bound by no law.

"They must be worse than blind who cannot see with what undeviating regularity of system, in this case and in all cases, they pursue their scheme for the destruction of every independent power," he wrote in his Letters on a Regicide Peace. "Their will is the law, not only at home, but as to the concerns of every nation.  They have swept aside the very constitutions under which Legislatures acted and the Laws were made."

Eerily prescient, no? And what has driven the European Parliament to these lengths? What has provoked them to tear up their own rules? A massive filibuster that was preventing them from passing any Bills? Hardly.

As loyal readers of this blog will know, the President of the European Parliament already enjoys considerable discretionary powers. But MEPs have two rights that even he cannot override: we can demand that votes be counted electronically rather than by a show-of-hands (a slightly slower procedure, but a more accurate one, and one that allows everyone to see how their MEPs voted); and we can ask for the right to explain, in not more than one minute, why we voted as we did.

A handful of pro-referendum MEPs - souverainistes from Poland and France, Scandinavian Left-wingers, UKIP and Conservatives from Britain, along with Jim Allister from Northern Ireland, the most honest man in Unionist politics - decided to make full use of both procedures in order to protest about the cancellation of the promised referendums and the implementation of large parts of the constitution in anticipation of formal ratification. I have been ending every speech, in a playful echo of Cato's "Delenda Est Carthago", with "Pacto Olisipiensis Censenda Est" - The Lisbon Treaty must be Put to the Vote.

Two dozen MEPs making a series of one minute speeches hardly constitutes a filibuster. At worst, we would have kept MEPs from their lunch for half an hour and perhaps delayed the start of the afternoon session. But even this is intolerable to the parliamentary authorities. Blinded by their resentment of "anti-Europeans", which is in turn a surrogate for the fear and contempt they feel for their own electorates, they have abandoned any pretence at legality in order to prevent us making our point in the chamber. The very sound of someone calling for a referendum is offensive to their guilty ears. The sight of even so moderate and respectable an MEP as Kathy Sinnot, an Irish disability rights campaigner, wearing a tee-shirt with the word "REFERENDUM" has led to her being summoned for disciplinary action.

What they really hate, my federalist colleagues, is being reminded of the fact that they all supported referendums until it became clear they would lose them. We are their bad consciences, the ghosts at their feast.

To prolong the Macbeth reference a little, the shocking thing about their behaviour  is not that they are trying to silence their critics, nor even that they are breaking the rules - after all, they are doing so on a much grander scale by reviving the constitution following two "No" votes. No, the breath-taking aspect of the whole business is that they haven't troubled to hide the illegality of what they're doing. They've happily put it all on paper. As Lady Macbeth puts it:

"What need we fear who knows it, when none can call our power to account?"

But there comes a point when the arrogance of power, the sense that there is one rule for the elites and one for everyone else, becomes intolerable. A point where Birnam Wood starts advancing on Dunsinane. By behaving as they have, MEPs have brought forward that moment.

It is now clear that the constitution has no legitimacy. It is becoming clear, too that the European Parliament has lost whatever shreds of legitimacy it might once have had. So let me close with another prescient quotation from Burke:

"Who that admires, and from the heart is attached, to true national parliaments, but must turn in horror and disgust from such a profane burlesque and parody of that sacred institution."