Scratching my head over the EU

This blog doesn't post much about the EU. Between Richard North's scholarly mini-essays and Open Europe's blogs of media coverage there is very little for the ordinary blogger to add.

This doesn't mean I acquiesce in the EU. But government carefully denies us the chance to vote against the Lisbon treaty, merely because Herr Brownmeister is sure we will reject it. Nor will the country will ever vote in numbers for the inadequate clowns who have a stranglehold on UKIP. But that doesn't mean voters want more integration with the EU and the government knows it.

Armageddon Ambrose-Pritchard has another of his excoriating pieces in the Telegraph today. It includes numbers, so it's in the business section, and on the inside pages at that. He is stressing the undemocratic nature of the Lisbon process, explaining that Ireland is sleep-walking into economic trouble it will be helpless to prevent, and most importantly explaining the fundamental changes to which we are being exposed -

Our shared Anglo-Celtic culture has long been a well-spring of free enterprise (with Dutch, Swedish, and Hanseatic help in fighting European absolutism along the way), and that is what is so threatened by the Lisbon Treaty, the treaty to end all EU treaties.

The text strikes the words "free and undistorted competition" from the core objectives of the Union. Corporatist aims will enjoy a higher legal status at the European Court (ECJ) and must prevail if the two clash. The Rhineland Model has locked in a permanent advantage.

Euro-creep is already eviscerating the Common Law that underpins the British and Irish way of doing business. Lisbon quickens the pace. It upgrades the ECJ to a de facto supreme court, with broader jurisdiction. It will have the last say on a raft of new economic and social rights. Who can stop them imposing a Colbertist agenda by court rulings, if they so choose? The ECJ is beyond appeal.

Euro-judges will decide how and when to enforce the Charter of Fundamental Rights, now made legally-binding. Article 52 allows the "limitation" of all liberties in the "general interest" of the Union. This is the old Reich clause. Such justifications for state coercion have been illegal in Europe for 60 years. Now they return, by the back door.

For instance, German leaders are to propose a worldwide ban on oil trading by speculators. And the perpetual Jean-Claude Juncker, leader of Luxembourg since 1995 with a population of 467,000, wants an upper limit on salaries.

And he concludes that "a British prime minister slinks away to a private room to commit Britain to an arrangement that alienates the powers of Parliament - in perpetuity and perhaps illegally - knowing that his people would vote 'no' by crushing margins if given a chance".

Now, we know that most politicians give no sign of understanding anything about economics at all, here or in the rest of the EU. I am no flag-waving Jerusalem singer harking back to the grand old days of the British Empire. I just don't get why the political class wants to give our freedom away - and indeed their freedom too - and condemn us to the likelihood of gradually pauperising foreign rule.

Silence is not consent.




Original at - Purple Scorpion