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Nick Cohen on attitudes to the European Union:
Britain has three coherent European policies: to leave (Ukip); to go further in (the Liberal Democrats); and to co-operate but remain aloof from full integration (the Major, Blair and Brown administrations). Cameron lacks the courage to choose any of the above and his indecision will produce a crisis.
The co-operate but remain aloof plan simply isn’t viable. While that has indeed been what UK governments have tried to do, we’ve ended up with a series of treaties that simply insist upon ever greater expansion of the powers at Brussels.
That leaves only two coherent strategies. Further in or out altogether. That is the choice that we’re faced with: bumbling along simply won’t work.
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From here, eight pointless things about me.
I’m a political party. There isn’t anything pointless about me.
(Yes, yes, I know I’m not playing the game…..)
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From the Liberal Democrats euro election manifesto:
By combining our economic power, as we have done through the single market, Europe gets better trade deals around the world than if each country were to negotiate independently.
Clearly no one in the entire party actually undertands the point of trade. Here’s the most recent Nobel Laureate in economics explaining about trade:
An international economics course should drive home to students the point that international trade is not about competition, it is about mutually beneficial exchange. Even more fundamentally, we should be able to teach students that imports, not exports, are the purpose of trade. That is, what a country gains from trade is the ability to import what it wants. Exports are not an objective in and of themselves: the need to export is a burden that the country must bear because its import suppliers are crass enough to demand payment.
All of the “trade deals” that the EU negotiates, those that the Lib Dims are praising, are about our exports. Which, as a real economist points out, are not what trade is about at all. What we’re interested in is the imports and the price we pay for them.
And, as we also know, the European Union imposes taxes upon imports. 66% on those Chinese compact fluorescent light bulbs that they insist we buy, 60% on Chinese candles and all of the rest.
The point of trade is the imports and the European Union deliberately makes them more expensive. Thus we get very bad trade deals indeed because of our membership of the EU.
But then I’m expecting a Lib Dim to have some knowledge of economics when I say that, aren’t I? Some hope, eh?
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And what do you think was the reason the council gave for the repainting of the spaces? Because they had to comply with an EU Directive which lays out how big the spaces must be. I ask you.
What on earth has the size of car parking spaces in Tunbridge Wells got to do with the EU?
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This is a very useful little list from the UKIP Witney site. A list of terms used when talking about the European Union.
Even people like me who are already supposed to know all this stuff will find it useful as an aide memoire.
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We’re often told by the likes of Polly Toynbee that we should be more like Sweden. And it has to be said, there are times when this is true.
The home market is looking bruised as well. Sweden’s property prices have begun to buckle after rising by 175pc since 1996 in a British-style boom. The Riksbank slashed rates to 1pc last week and is openly mulling currency devaluation as well as bond purchases as a part of a radical stimulus. The kronor has fallen nearly 20pc against the euro, helping to cushion the downturn.
“It’s been a blessing. This is exactly why a country needs its own currency,” said Mr Magnusson.
Quite. You need to have flexibility in an economy and a floating currency is one of the best ways of getting that.
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A very nice point made in the Lords:
I suggest to the Minister—perhaps he will correct me if I am wrong—that a man is innocent until he is proved guilty.
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Made very well here:
None of this misery should entitle Britons to much Schadenfreude; indeed, it will intensify our own recession. But we can at least afford ourselves a grim smile over the fact that this crisis is not ours alone. And we should thank the Lord that we stayed outside the euro. This is precisely the moment when free-floating independent currencies and interest rates come into their own. The nasty dose of medicine doled out to the patient is starting to work.
Alarming and discomforting as it is to see the Bank of England pledging to start the printing presses, or to watch the pound slide by more than a quarter, these are precisely the factors that will ensure Britain’s recession is less intense than that experienced by other countries. The only worry is that the freeze in world trade leads to a full-blown slide into protectionism, but that is a horror story for another day.
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Bruno Waterfield reporting upon the Parliament’s TV channel:
It costs £53,000 for every hour broadcast but under 160,000 people have watched it since broadcasting began in mid-September. Over 60,000 of those were in the first week.
This means that this lavishly funded European Union channel attracts less than 1200 viewers every day, from a potential audience of over 400 million.
It is, of course, the European Parliament’s EuroparlTV. That’s the web-TV service that will cost more than £32 million over four years, over £9,000 worth of vanity programmes for each and every MEP per annum.
1200 a day? For £32 million?
That’s less traffic than my blog gets. No, not this party one, but my personal one, the one that’s just me grumbling at the world.
They’re really not getting very far in this bright new online world, are they?
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Very interesting indeed. I normally take MigrationWatch with a pinch of salt but as far as I can see these figures stand up:
5 The Labour force survey is the best available source. For the fourth quarter of 2008 this shows a UK born workforce of 25,582,000. The number of workers born in the A 8 countries was 482,000; this represents a fall of about 6% on the previous quarter but is very similar to the level of Q 4 2007 so there is, as yet, no clear sign of a significant return home by East European workers. The number of workers born in the EU 14 countries was 690,000; thus the total born in the other European Union countries was 1,172,000. The same survey gave the total number of non UK born as 3,819,000. Thus 70% of foreign born workers come from outside the EU [1].
6. Measured by nationality the results are different because some 1.5 million migrant workers have acquired British nationality. A8 nationals are 469,000 while EU 14 nationals come to 548,000 giving a total of EU nationals of 1,017,000.
British workers in the EU
7 The number of UK Nationals working in other EU countries is approximately 286,000. The main destinations are Germany 65,000, Ireland 52,000, Spain 42,000, France 36,000, Netherlands 28,000 (Annex A).
8 The number of EU workers in Britain is thus three or four times the number of British workers in the EU, depending on whether you take the EU born or those who are still EU nationals. Reasons for this imbalance may include limited language skills among British workers, relatively low unemployment rates in Britain in recent years and the fact that wages here are generally higher than in most EU countries.
Fascinating, no?