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All sounds very good, doesn’t it?
BRITAIN will have a referendum on the Lisbon Treaty in October if the Tories win a 2009 snap election, David Cameron declared last night.
The Tory leader and his shadow foreign secretary William Hague vowed to put the hated constitution to a national vote in the autumn.
Mr Cameron – who also promised to keep the Pound – made his pledge to The Sun.
He said he would honour the commitment as soon as possible after a spring General Election victory.
But, umm, as there isn’t going to be a snap General Election then they won’t win one and they won’t hold a referendum.
This is as weasel worded and mealy mouthed as Brown’s own promise to have a referendum on the Constitution: which we won’t have now because they’ve changed the title page to “Lisbon Treaty”.
We’ve got to get out so that people will stop lying to us in this manner.
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One of the little things about how the newspaper business works is that a lot of stories come from the Press Association. Each newspaper then either prints the piece or, more likley, takes the parts of it that it wants and then prints it as their own story.
So one of the things that we try to keep an eye on in the press office is, if something is mentioned in a Press Association story, which of the newspapers then use that little bit of it that mentions us?
Like this from the PA story about Sir Dai:
Nigel Farage, leader of the UKIP party, paid tribute to Sir Dai, saying: “He was a larger than life character who brought great joy to both life and our party.
“We are sad to see him gone. We will remember him, and of course we will still be fighting for what he believed in, which is a free, sovereign and independent United Kingdom.”
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What, actually, is the point of electing a Conservative Euro MP? Nodding donkey’s might actually be more useful: at least a donkey sometimes turns around and bites back.
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We all know what the point of the European Union is. Sr. Barroso has told us. It’s to stop Germany invading France. Again*.
Is this really a necessary part of ensuring that?
The EU has also imposed a limit on the quantity of cow pats that can be allowed to stand on farm land. The NFU has warned that the 170 kilos per hectare limit is too low for about 40pc of dairy farms and the Government has agreed to lobby Brussels to raise the limit to 250 kilos.
We need to monitor the toilet habits of cows to stop the Wehrmacht marching down the Champs Elysee again?
Can we leave yet?
* There is a thought that, after four or five attempts at taking France over the last couple of centuries, the Wehrmacht actually succeeded last time. Perhaps, having actually taken the place, they simply think now that France isn’t worth the effort, and thus we don’t need to worry about it?
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As Nigel says:
UKIP leader Nigel Farage said: “Monsieur Pinte clearly does not understand the UN convention on refugees but prefers to pass on the problem to Britain. And he has no understanding of history as most of the countries he refers to were not British colonies.”
Well, quite. Would be immigrants into the UK can be divided into three groups. Firstly, those who are EU citizens, such as those from Eastern Europe. They have, under EU law, an absolute right to move and settle in here, just as you or I have an absolute right to move to any other EU country. Whether we like this or not is entirely different from whether this is true or not. (There are still some restrictions on Romanians or Bulgarians *working* in the UK, but they have the freedom to come here all the same.)
The second group are migrants from outside the EU. These might be economic migrants, family members, students, whatever, and at present it is up to each individual country as to who they will let in and why. Brazil and Portugal have a special arrangement for historical reasons, as an example, as the UK does with, say, family members in ex-Empire countries. The EU is very much trying to take control of this aspect of immigration and is encroaching on the national perogatives. For example, there’s a mooted change whereby someone who comes in under one of those special arrangements, or who gets the right to live in any one EU country, can then assume the right to live in any other EU country.
Then there’s the third group, asylum seekers. These are people (in the true definition) fleeing oppression in their homelands. The law here isn’t either national or EU. It’s a UN Convention. The problem I think that most of us have isn’t that there is a special set of laws for asylum seekers. We wouldn’t send dissidents back to be murdered by a Stalin type figure, send Jews into the Holocaust, the problem is in distinguishing between those cases and those who are simply adopting such a cloak to cover their desire to be economic migrants.
So, what is it that M. Pinte said?
In an open letter to France’s Immigration Minister Brice Hortefeux, Mr Pinte, the MP for Versailles, said Britain should accept all the migrants in northern France and consider their asylum claims on British soil.
He said: “Why are the British rejecting them while at the same time they’re welcoming thousands of citizens from eastern Europe and in particular from Poland?
“They don’t want to stay in France. They have a common history with the British. Most of them speak English. They often have family members who emigrated to Great Britain at a time when being part of the Commonwealth entitled them to do so.
The EU migrants are let in because EU law insists that they should be let in. The asylum seekers are in France because asylum seekers don’t have the right to go where they want. They have the right to claim shelter and succour from the first safe country they get to. Unless he’s saying that France is not a safe place, the very fact that they are in France means that, as asylum seekers, France is the place they should seek asylum.
This isn’t a matter of interpretation, or nuance, this is simply what the law is. And as Nigel points out, M. Pinte seems to simply not know what this law is.
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This is something I find really quite disturbing:
Britain’s army of Euro MPs are to see their pay soar by almost £20,000 under reforms intended to end the Brussels gravy train.
A deal due to take effect this year will see MEPs’ salaries increase by around a third to £82,000, making them higher paid than Westminster MPs.
No, not really that bit. If people are going to take currency risks with their pay then there will be times when the rates move in their favour….and times when they move against them. Rather, it’s these two bits.
Currently the 78 British MEPs are paid £63,291, the same as MPs. But from July they will be paid in euros which represents a bumper pay rise given the current strength of the European currency against sterling.
The wage hike at a time when thousands of jobs are being lost has outraged critics, who accuse MEPs of being out of touch with the grim economic reality faced by millions.
Under the deal, members of the European Parliament are also exempt from British tax and National Insurance and instead are charged a lower special EU tax of between 15 per cent and 17 per cent.
It isn’t just that they will be paid in euros. It’s that they will be paid by the European Parliament, not the Home Office. That’s right, no longer will our representatives be paid by us. The second is that special tax rate. This will be the first time ever that our constituency representatives will face a different tax rate from constituents.
That, to me at least, is a very dangerous innovation, it’s the beginning of the creation of a special privileged class.
Yes, OK, the Treasury says that it will introduce a new special tax rate to make up for this but again, that’s the creation of a new special system, another set of privileges.
There’s a much simpler solution. The Government can simply say that all MEPs will continue to be paid by the taxpayer, by the Home Office, and not the European Parliament. This power exists under the current regulations. And after all, the MEPs are our representatives to the Parliament, aren’t they, they’re not the Parliament’s representatives to us. And if they’re paid by the Home Office, as now, then they’ll face the same tax system as us, as now.
And as Nigel says:
MEP Nigel Farage, leader of the UK Independence Party, said: ‘I think MEPs should be paid the same as MPs.
‘Given the current exchange rate, it is an outrage that MEPs face a massive pay increase. Voters will be very angry about this.’
And there are two ways to get a pay rise of course….get more money, or pay less of it in tax.
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So we in the UK have to approve one of the most intrusive laws we’ve ever seen as a result of the EU telling us we must do so.
From March, ISPs will have to keep data about emails sent and received in the UK for a year in an EU-wide bid to tackle terrorism.
They would have to be able to provide the timing and number of communications from individuals, but not their content.
It follows a ruling last October that telecoms companies should keep records of phone calls and text messages for 12 months
About 57 billion text messages were sent in Britain last year, while an estimated three billion emails are sent every day.
Parliament approved the powers, described as a vital tool against terrorism, last July under the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000.
The law is being implemented as part an EC directive, and the Government will reportedly have to pay the ISPs more than £25 million to ensure it is obeyed.
The whole idea is simply abhorrent under our system of law. We haven’t, historically, allowed the State to take such powers for our basic belief is that yes, there are indeed things that we define as crimes but everything else is not just legal to do but our right to do if we should so wish.
It’s simply no business of the government who we email or text. Only if we are charged with a crime can such records be accessed: that’s how we’ve historically done things. That isn’t, unfortunately, how it has historically been on the Continent. And we seem to be importing the worst parts of the continental relationship between the citizen and the State rather than exporting our own much better system.
Time we leace before that uniquely British system of freedom and liberty is entirely destroyed.
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Yet more evidence that we really don’t want to be in the euro….as several countries that are in it are finding out that they really don’t want to be.
Spain lost almost 140,000 jobs in December, pushing unemployment to 3.1m or 13.4pc. The Labour Office said the country had shed a million in jobs in 2008 as the building boom collapsed. This is equivalent to 7m job losses in the United States.
The Labour Secretary Maravillas Rojo said she could not rule out a rise in unemployment to 4m this year. “We are in an unprecedented situation, and 2009 is going to be very difficult,” she said.
Madrid now has its hands tied under the constraints of monetary union. It cannot slash interest rates or devalue, and it has already exhausted its scope for fiscal stimulus under the EU’s Stability Pact.
There has to be flexibility in the economy: if you’re not going to get it from interest rates and an exchange rate that suits local conditions, then you’re going to have to get it the difficult way, through mass unemployment.
Better to have the interest rate and exchange rate flexibility, don’t you think?
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Disturbing news from Brussels:
BRITAIN’S vital North Sea oil and gas supplies are to be taken over by Europe under emergency plans revealed for the first time in Brussels yesterday.
EU leaders are demanding control of British energy reserves to prevent power blackouts that have left millions of eastern Europeans without heat in Arctic weather due to the Russian gas blockade.
No, this isn’t just some crazed idea (although it is crazed). This is something that they already have the power to do. Or at least, power they will have if the Lisbon Treaty finally gets ratified.
The transfer of ownership would be enacted under secret powers written into the controversial Lisbon Treaty. It gives Europe the legal power to take over individual states’ supplies to “ensure security of energy supply in the Union”.
Ultimate control over Britain’s vast natural gas and oil fields – by far the biggest resource within the EU – will fall to Brussels if the new treaty, which has already been ratified by Britain, is adopted throughout Europe.
Yup. They want what is ours.
Last night, however, there were calls for Britain to stand firm against the seizure of our oil and gas. UKIP leader Nigel Farage said: “Brussels has already stolen our fish. Now they want our oil and gas. These are vital resources to Britain and we demand that the British Government vetoes these proposals. This shows how vital it is that the UK holds a referendum on our future in the European Union.”
As Nigel says, they want to take the oil and gas just as they’ve taken the fish. And they’ve made a right pig’s ear of the fisheries, haven’t they?
Can we leave yet?
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Yes, I know, it’s not often that we think that the President of the European Union has good ideas. However, the post has just been taken up by Vaclav Klaus of the Czech Republic. He’s got a great piece in the Financial Times today.
Aggregate demand needs strengthening. One traditional way to do this is to increase government expenditures, probably in public infrastructure projects, on condition these are available. It would be much more helpful, however, to have a great reduction in all kinds of restrictions on private initiatives introduced in the last half a century during the era of the brave new world of the “social and ecological market economy”. The best thing to do now would be temporarily to weaken, if not repeal, various labour, environmental, social, health and other “standards”, because they block rational human activity more than anything else.
As regards the EU’s “constitutional” stalemate, the Czech government will – hopefully – not lead Europe to an ever-closer union, to a Europe of regions (instead of states), to a centralised, supranational Europe or to an increasingly controlled and regulated Europe masterminded from above. It will keep stressing its EU presidency slogan “Europe without barriers”, which means the advocacy of further liberalisation, removing trade barriers and getting rid of protectionism.
Our historical experience gives us a clear instruction: we always need more of markets and less of government intervention. We also know that government failure is more costly than market failure.
It’s worth reading the whole thing. However, we do need to remember on huge caveat. That however hard we try we know that this isn’t the way that the Project is going to develop. It just isn’t going to be possible to negotiate from within, we need to leave so that we can build this desirable end point for ourselves: the EU is never going to become what we desire.