The EU is forcing Poland to choose between money or the constitution

You might find it difficult, not to mention dangerous, to get to see a real meeting between an irresistible force and an immovable object. But if you’re looking for the next best experience over Christmas, you could well take a look at the ballooning legal spat between Poland and the EU.

To remind you of the background, it is part of Brussels’s catechism that its law must at all times and in all places trump the law of a member State. True, the principle doesn’t appear in the treaties; but the Court of Justice, from which there is no appeal, has said so since 1963. And the rule is unyielding: were the most basic and entrenched constitutional norm to clash with a Euro-regulation on the packaging of bananas, the flick of the Eurocrat’s pen would still take precedence.

Last October, the Polish government asked its own Constitutional Tribunal what it would do faced with a conflict between Euro-law and the Polish constitution.