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Making dire predictions about the organisational abilities of the European Union is a fairly safe bet I reckon, but even I have been taken aback by the speed with which this prediction (from early April):
“So, cue another round of horse-trading, bickering and monumental waste as each part of the Galileo project is apportioned out according to who makes the most noise. The French will build the electrics, the Italians will build the housing, the Belgians will make the navigation system, the Germans will make the rocket boosters, the Spanish will make the launch platform, the Austrians will make the sandwiches and Sweden will provide the environmental protestors.”
has become this reality:
“Germany and Italy are fighting it out within the European Space Agency for the right to provide the main production base for the satellite system, to which EU governments gave the green light in March.
Their dispute has prevented the ESA from beginning work on the project and risks setting back its projected completion date of 2008.”
I submit that I am entitled to enjoy a brief frisson of self-congratulation.
[My thanks to Philip Chaston for the second link]
Or so says leading New Labour talking head and failed Northern Ireland Secretary Peter Mandelson.
He says one of Europe’s “huge challenges” in the next couple of years includes “rebuilding the Atlantic alliance”. Well this is indeed a ‘European’ problem, but not a British problem. British relations with the United States and Canada are just fine, thanks… it is the governments of France and Germany which have problems with anti-Americanism at the highest levels.
At least I agree with the dismal Mandelson on one point: the need for ‘British Leadership’ in Europe. Let the nations of Europe follow Britain as it walks briskly for the door marked EXIT.
Jim Bennett‘s latest Anglosphere article is a particularly good one called The European Roach Motel.
It addressed in more depth the same issues we touched on in The traitor class at work.
So moves are afoot to lock the UK into the EU, sponsored by a man who is by any reasonable definition a traitor, by the name of Andrew Duff.
Pass whatever laws you wish, Andrew dear…as long as Britain maintains its own armed forces, ultimately British society can elect to rid itself of its onerous ties to socialist Europe, at bayonet point if required regardless of your meaningless legalisms… at which point it might be best for all concerned if you decided it would be prudent for you to stay in Brussels rather than come back to what you clearly do not regard as home.
A new poll suggests anti-euro sentiment hits new high. A survey carried out in early August, found 60 percent of respondents said they would vote against joining the euro, if the government held a referendum then on replacing the pound. Only 26 percent of the 2,000 respondents said they would vote in favour of joining the single European currency.
The only problem I have with this news is the old, but true, adage “lies, damn lies, and statistics”. And the sample of 2,000 respondents is far too small for rejoicing. At least it seems to be going the right direction.
Adriana wishes she were dreaming and so do a number of British Plane Spotters. Let’s face it. The Greek government are a bunch of whackos and their very presence in the EU should be more than enough to convince any sane person to get far clear of it.
I expect the economic consequence to them to be absolutely disastrous. Would you recommend Greece for a holiday if you have to leave your palm pilot, your laptop, your phone and god knows what else behind? Would you even consent to a business meeting in that backward country? Not I, for damn sure.
Want to see just how ghastly the European Copyright Directive is? Well look at this Stand article and then tell me why the EU is a good thing.
I’ve had BBC2 TV’s Newsnight on while doing other things, and two little overhearings reached out and grabbed my attention.
First, someone called, I think, Mark something, of, I think they said, csn.com (but it can’t have been that because csn.com doesn’t seem to exist), talked from Johannesburg about how George Bush should have gone to this Earth Summit beano and taken, quote, “a principled stand in favour of free market capitalism”, unquote. You don’t usually hear language like that on the BBC, which I suppose is the fault of people like me for not contriving to be on it enough. Most “principled stands” over here are for things that are bad. Mark Something is, inevitably, an American, and his point was that George W, by remaining silent about, e.g. his real opinion of “global warming”, he leaves it wide open for a successor US administration to cave in to the Transnazis. Quite right.
And the other soundbite that got my attention was from Home Secretary Jack Straw, saying in very grand looking clothes in the middle of a very grand looking speech that the European Union now “creates the impression that power is draining away from” … and then it was either Westminster or national parliaments generally, I didn’t catch which.
“Creates the impression.” I love that.
Everywhere else in Europe they know that power is draining away from national parliaments, and those who favour this, as the majority of people who matter do, say so. They know it’s happening and they’re for it. Only Britain’s pitifully mendacious European Unionists still bash away with their ever more obviously lying lie that Europe is fine because it isn’t going to change anything. We’re just going to, you know, huddle together a little.
In the long run, it could cost them the entire argument. Britain is half-joined to the EU already, and this is already having huge consequences which Britain’s Parliament can do nothing about unless it is willing to contemplate non-membership. Yet at no point in the last five decades have any big arguments in favour of what is actually happening actually been put to us, because the pro-EU line was and still is that this stuff never would happen and is still not happening.
Which means that the British people might, any decade now, decide to get out of the thing. Except that: our anti-EU politicians are no better. They don’t say what they think either.
No “principled stands” can be heard from either side.
Although I have never been a huge fan of Statewatch, a civil liberties advocacy group whose membership contains a high proportion of socialists (which I have always thought analogous to a temperance society whose membership contains a high proportion of brewers), the latest Statewatch press release is well worth reading.
They clearly lay out how the European Union is about to take a giant leap towards the sort of total surveillance super-state that the Soviet Union could only dream of implementing. As Tony Bunyan, Statewatch editor, comments in the press release:
EU governments claimed that changes to the 1997 EC Directive on privacy in telecommunications to allow for data retention and access by the law enforcement agencies would not be binding on Members States – each national parliament would have to decide. Now we know that all along they were intending to make it binding, “compulsory”, across Europe.
The right to privacy in our communications – e-mails, phone-calls, faxes and mobile phones – was a hard-won right which has now been taken away. Under the guise of fighting “terrorism” everyone’s communications are to be placed under surveillance.
Gone too under the draft Framework Decision are basic rights of data protection, proper rules of procedure, scrutiny by supervisory bodies and judicial review
The Panopticon super-state ‘of the future’ is now very much upon us.
 When the state watches you, dare to stare back
Although he is not the first to comment on the large (and growing) rift between the USA and Europe, James Bennett delivers up a superb analysis of the role of Tony Blair in trying to act as a bridge between them and why he may well end up as political hamburger as a result:
“As always, the biggest problem is the inherent structural one implied in Blair’s strategy: the assumption that by integrating more completely into the European Union, Britain is also serving America’s interests by being a bridge between the two continents. This is not an eccentric position; it has been the standard assumption of the American foreign policy establishment from the end of the Second World War. It is, however, wrong. Where it fails is the assumption that Europe as a whole and America are sufficiently alike that their interests will naturally be aligned.
Jim is spot on. For all his blather about ‘modernisation’, Blair has both feet firmly planted in the past, seemingly unaware of his inability to bridge the gulf between the two civilisations and equally oblivious to the harsh fact that the gulf may not be bridgeable at all. This is not just about the Middle East or Iraq; they are merely symptoms of a divergence that is economic, political, cultural and even spiritual.
In some senses, the EU and Radical Islam have more in common. Their respective visions are, for sure, not the same, but they do share the quality of being a settled view about the way the world should be and neither can really brook any meaningful alternatives, lest their own visions be undermined. For Radical Islam, the answer is endless Jihad; for the EU the answer is the Kyoto Protocol, the ICC and global regulation. In both cases, the message to America is the same: submit.
For the EU elite, America is like a rebellious teenager that they simply don’t understand. How can they insist on sovereignty when it obstructs ‘progress’? How can they insist on the right of self-defence when we know that true security comes only through concessions and negotiation? How dare they cherish Western values when we know that all values are equal? For the Eurocrats, America is not just mystifying, it’s offensive.
But there is also a deeper, darker cause of Europe’s mistrust. The political classes of Europe may disagree on many things but of on one issue there is no dissent: the European Union and the overriding importance of creating a country called ‘Europe’. Everything else, all policy, all laws and all effort must be focussed on melding together a continent’s worth of fractious nations into one monolithic political and social entity with one government, one flag, one currency, one voice etc. They can’t do it and they know in their hearts that they can’t do it. So instead of having an identity, they are creating an anti-identity and that anti-identity is anti-America. It is how the EU will define itself, being unable to define itself by any other totems.
Regardless of the fate of the Iraqi regime, America will most likely get more American and, Europe, with the cancer of post-modernism coded into its DNA, will get more anti-American. Cold War it may not be, but it will be cold. Freezing, in fact.
The British public deserves a high quality news network which ruggedly pursues the virtues of impartiality, integrity and honesty. Alas, it doesn’t have one. Instead it has the BBC. And this is not just my jaundiced opinion anymore. Now it’s official.
BBC Worldwide, the commercial arm of the BBC, has just signed a major development deal with the European Investment Bank (the bribery wing of the EU) worth £25 million (about $40 million) and which will enable them to produce news, education programmes and children’s programmes guaranteed to be ‘objective’.
The cynical among you might imagine that such munificence rarely comes without strings attached but you’d be wrong. In this case, it comes with bloody great mooring ropes i.e. it is an implicit condition of all EIB funding that lucky recipients must not play host to any criticism of the EU. Nice little deal, eh?
So next time you surf onto their website of link to one of their stories or hear one of their broadcasts, remember: the BBC is a whore, bought and paid for.
Lest I appear puritanical about all of this, I must stress that I have no objection to people selling or buying sexual services but it does seem so unfair that the Eurocrats get all the pleasure while the British public get screwed.
To compare Chris Patten with Marshal Petain is a disgraceful slur.
In the first place there were German troops marching through the streets of Paris and 13 million French civilian refugees trying to escape a war zone when he agreed to the Armistice. What’s Patten’s excuse?
Second, I don’t know how Patten would have coped with defending Verdun in 1916, and glad I am too…
Third, Petain , and I only discovered this recently to my great surprise, wasn’t anti-American and pro-euro-union.
Fourth, Petain only shook hands with Hitler, he didn’t kiss his …
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