THE world is so crazy these days that satire is impossible. I heard on the BBC's Sunday Programme an item about a man who has written a book to say that the European Union is being run by the Antichrist.

It sounds like something presented by a partnership between Jacques Delors and Stephen King. But before you petition to have the producer of the Sunday Programme put in a straitjacket on account of his serious loss of marbles, just consider this week's real news story: the British Government has accepted the EU's laws on so called Human Rights and these are now authoritative in this country.

It's sounds nice doesn't it, and innocent enough? Let's all have rights.

It is easy to forget the fact that every "right" heaps on someone else the responsibility for providing that "right". What it will actually result in is a bonanza for lawyers as everyone takes everyone else to court for alleged rights abuses.

Workers will sue their bosses, and bosses sue their workers. Neighbourhood disagreements will increasingly become matters for litigation.

The whole effect will be to ensure that our already violent society becomes more aggressive and belligerent as everyone jumps on the rights band-wagon and demands what he thinks is his due.

This implementation of the Human Rights legislation is the biggest change in British law since Roman times.

There is a subtle and crucial difference between the way we do things and the way these things are done on the Continent: continental legal systems rule that everything is prohibited unless it is specifically allowed; our system says (sorry, used to say) that everything which is not explicitly prohibited is allowed.

Ours is not just a more relaxed, easy-going and less bureaucratic way of ordering our social and national life: it is what makes the difference between a free country and a police state.

The implementation of Human Rights legislation is one more giant step towards handing over control of all our national authority to the EU.

Those in thrall to everything the EU stands for will of course dismiss my claims as a mere scare story put out by a little-Englander/Eurosceptic. It isn't a scare story at all. It's the sad truth. It's all there in black and white in the treaties of Maastricht and Amsterdam. We might as well have the funeral for Britain right now.

Lord McCluskey has called the new legislation: "A field day for crackpots, a pain in the neck for judges and a gold mine for lawyers."

I started off by saying that the state of things is so barmy that satire now strikes us a quite realistic compared with what actually happens. It's true. This week the Controller of BBC One described that voyeuristic drivel Big Brother as an example of "progress" in broadcasting. And he's the bloke given the top job allegedly to halt the dumbing-down of television! If Big Brother is a sign of progress, what next - Blind Date as an improvement on Romeo and Juliet?

That Sunday Programme must be desperately short of religious news. Otherwise why tell the tale of - and I'm not making this up - the man who is going round the sacred shrines which contain relics of Jesus Christ with a view to extracting the DNA and cloning the Saviour?

This way, he says, we won't have to rely on praying for the Second Coming of Christ. As he put it: "We have the technology. We might as well arrange the Second Coming at a time to suit ourselves."

No doubt the perpetrator of the lunatic plan to clone Christ is free from the fear of prosecution, for "freedom of expression" is guaranteed under the new EU Human Rights legislation.

l The Rev Peter Mullen is Rector of St Micahel's in the City of London and Chaplain to the Stock Exchange