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It really is remarkable what people will complain about:
French and German ministers are expected to confront the Chancellor over sterling’s weakness at the opening dinner for the Group of Seven finance summit in Rome tonight. They will ask him to consider direct action to increase the value of the pound, which has suffered its worst devaluation since at least the final breakdown of the Bretton Woods agreement in the early 1970s.
What’s that use of the word “worst” there? “Best” would be more appropriate, no? The economy has suffered a shock and prices must therefore change. That they change to the new, correct, level is not a bad thing, but a good thing. And an exchange rate is only that, a price.
The pound has weakened by about a quarter over the past year as it has become increasingly apparent that the UK faces a worse recession than most other developed nations, and that the Bank’s Monetary Policy Committee will be forced to slash interest rates as a result.
OK, if this is true, then the pound should indeed change in value in response. This is the very point of having a market in anything at all, so as to discover prices.
In particular, companies in Europe have complained that the pound’s recent devaluation has left their exporters suffering, as businesses are switching to cheaper British goods.
Well, quite, that’s rather the point. That’s why we’re happy that we have an independent currency so that the value can indeed change: and thus the symptom of the problem, a falling exchange rate, becomes the solution to the problem.
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An interesting little detail that explains something that sometimes puzzles people about our activities in the European Parliament.
The European Parliament’s campaigning Petitions Committee approved a damning new report slamming planning loopholes which leave homeowners defenceless against developers seizing part or all of their property.
Sounds terribly important, doesn’t it? And the law they’re complaining about is indeed vile. But here’s the important line:
Now the Petitions Committee - which has no direct power - has made a new call on the Madrid government to force revision of the regional law.
This is why we almost never sign up to such petitions and motions. They have no power over anything at all. They’re simply pious notions that show that MEPs “care”….not that MEPs are going to do anything about the subject. Something to show the constituents, not something that’s going to change anything.
For the truth is that MEPs and Parliament cannot do anything about this or any other matter. The European Parliament does not have the right to initiate legislation. It can only vote on or attempt to amend legislation sent to it by the Commission or perhaps other agencies of the EU.
It’s just another example of the lack of democracy within the whole system. The only elected people in it aren’t able to even propose the law. There is indeed a Parliament, as we know, but it’s a facade, the real power lies elsewhere.
Which is why we must leave, of course.
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Nigel has a piece in The Guardian’s Comment is Free.
Worth having a read.
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Has a great letter in the North Devon Gazette.
While the opposition leader foolishly derides ‘British jobs for British workers’ as a phrase “borrowed from the BNP”, Government Ministers claim to be looking for “a change in the rules” to prevent the monumental realisation that this is what EU membership is, fundamentally, all about. We are one of the wealthiest countries in the community of 27 - so everything we have must be made available to the others, until we are all as poor as each other.
Lord Mandelson, who is still paid to promote the EU despite being a British Cabinet Minister (his handsome EU pension will be withdrawn if he does otherwise - that is the rule), has broken the habit of a lifetime by telling it straight on this occasion: “Within the rules, UK companies can operate in Europe and European companies can operate here. Protectionism would be a sure-fire way of turning recession into depression.”
In the EU which is now our ruler, ‘British jobs for British workers’ is protectionism, it is against the rules and it will not be allowed. As Nigel Farage of UKIP told the BBC, “It doesn’t matter how many meetings are held, how much or how loud anyone shouts… we signed away our rights when we joined this prison of nations that is the EU.”
Get used to it. Or get angry, and demand that we withdraw from the EU and regain the right to keep ourselves in work.
There’s more there so do click through to read it. And you tell ‘em Steve, you tell ‘em like it is.
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Over at the EU Parliament site, they’ve got a little form asking what would be your first priority if you were elected as an MEP.
As Gawain says, it’s just too easy to have fun with something like this, isn’t it?
Go on, have a go. Tell ‘em what you really think.
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This is certainly a robust view.
In the grand abstract terms of the enlightenment, the legitimacy of government derives from the consent of the governed, and therefore no government should have the right to hand over its authority to some external body which is not democratically accountable to its own people. So when the framers of the EU arranged for the nations of Europe to do exactly that, they were repudiating the two centuries old political struggle for the rights and liberties of ordinary citizens, of government “of the people, by the people and for the people”. It has always been my view that this was a quite conscious decision by the EU founders who, in the wake of two world wars, came to believe that the infamous national crimes of the 20th century could be traced directly to the democratic revolutions of the 18th century, and that the only long-term solution to this was to replace democracy with oligarchy.
However, I think there’s an error there. For I’m not quite convinced that the democratic values of the enlightenment really ever quite took hold in certain continental states in the same way that they did here (and in the US which she discusses). Just as an example, France has always been run by an oligarchic bureaucracy, one much more closed to outside entrants than anything in this country.
So I’m not entirely certain that the EU is based so much on rejecting that enlightenment, rather, on those places which never really embraced it imposing their system upon those that did.
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British jobs and British workers……there’s actually nothing at all that anyone can do about this. Not one single thing, as Nigel points out:
And UKIP leader Nigel Farage said Acas would be powerless to help because European law barred countries from reserving jobs for its own workers.
“It doesn’t matter how many meetings are held, how much or how loud anyone shouts… we signed away our rights when we joined this prison of nations that is the EU,” he said.
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This story is simply a symptom of a much larger one, one that has very serious implications for us all.
A series of unofficial strikes broke out across Britain today over plans by oil companies to give jobs to construction workers from Portugal and Italy. The contractors were to work on the giant £200m Lindsey oil refinery at North Killingholme, North Lincolnshire.
The basic background is that any contract over a certain size must be put out to tender right across the European Union. If a foreign company, employing foreign labour, makes the best tender, then they get the job. There’s no way that, in Gordon Brown’s words, we can have “British jobs for British workers”. Because the EU rules simply say that we can’t.
This is bad enough of course but think about what happens next. Alistair Darling is talking about spending tens of billions, perhaps hundreds of billions, on infrastructure projects, shiny new trains, lots more windmills, perhaps a Severn Barrage and so on. And yes, part of the argument for this is to pull us out of the recession, to create jobs so that we don’t have millions upon millions of people languishing on the dole.
And it will be us taxpayers who have to pay for all of this of course. It might be paid for by borrowing now, but the bill will come home in the future.
Ah, yes, you’ve spotted it. We want to spend this money so as to provide those British jobs for British workers. That’s the whole Keynesian idea of a fiscal stimulus, of the infrastructure building. But under the EU rules, we can’t make these jobs only for the British. They have to be advertised right across the EU.
So what we’ll end up with is, as Godfrey Bloom has pointed out, “British taxes for foreign workers”.
It’s about time we left, don’t you think, and we ran our economy for us?
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This story about Iceland maybe applying to join the euro is rather interesting. Even, perhaps, joining the EU itself….although most people seem to think that you have to join the EU to join the euro.
Olli Rehn, the European commissioner in charge of enlargement, said: “The EU prefers two countries joining at the same time rather than individually. If Iceland applies shortly and the negotiations are rapid, Croatia and Iceland could join the EU in parallel. On Iceland, I hope I will be busier. It is one of the oldest democracies in the world and its strategic and economic positions would be an asset to the EU.”
That actually sounds very much like the Commissioner floating an idea rather than an actual plan happening. The big problem for Iceland is of course that joining the EU would mean joining the most disastrous of all fishing regimes in the world, the Common Fisheries Policy. As, indeed, people are noting.
While there is support for joining the euro as a currency safe haven to protect Iceland from a battering by the markets, there is less enthusiasm for full EU membership, particularly among those in the vital fishing sector.
There are those therefore suggesting something very different indeed. Adopting the euro but not joining the European Union.
This factor has fuelled talk of “unilateral euroisation”, meaning that Iceland might join or use the single currency without being admitted to the EU. This is dismissed in Brussels as nonsense.
I do have to wonder though why people are dismissing this as nonsense. Joining the euro might not be sensible, but it’s certainly entirely possible. There’s absolutely nothing at all that Brussels or anyone else could do to stop Iceland simply declaring that the euro was the only legal tender on the island.
Anyone with an ounce of knowledge of how monetary systems work would know that it’s not in fact very difficult to do. After all, Panama does not have its own currency and hasn’t for decades. They use the US $. Ecuador abolished their own currency and moved to the US $ in the 1990s (I think that date is correct). I lived and worked in Russia when there were two currencies, the rouble and the dollar.
As I say, this might or might not be a sensible idea, but it’s most certainly not nonsense.