Following Barroso’s contradictory speech calling for a federal European state, the Telegraph reports,
Germany, France and nine other of Europe’s most powerful countries have called for an elected European Union president and an end to Britain’s veto over defence policy in a radical blueprint mapping out the continent’s future.
And they report my comments,
Steve Baker, the Tory MP for Wycombe, warned that proposals to strip Britain of its veto over defence or foreign policy would be “the end of the UK as an independent country”.
“The EU is emerging as a fully-fledged state that is not under democratic control,” he said. “Any idea of making these changes without the overwhelming consent of the British people would be criminal.”
They did not have space for my remark that those behind the EU project are in danger of creating what they fear. As the propaganda I reported this week confirms, they have raised nationalism to the continental scale, centralising economic and political power beyond democratic control, just in time to face a currency crisis. As I have said before, this looks like being a historic faux pas.
Meanwhile, Dan Hannan writes,
Forty-nine per cent of Germans, according to Die Welt, think they would be better off without the EU, as against only 32 per cent who think they would suffer. Who’d have thought it, eh? Germans being fleeced by the EU? Es braucht keinen Geist, Gnädiger Herr, der aus seinem Grabe aufstehe, uns das zu sagen: there needs no ghost, my Lord, come from the grave, to tell us this.
It’s true that the trajectory of Europe was the final straw which drove me into politics but I now spend more of my time dealing with the inhumane consequences of faith in the omnipotence of state power. It is that faith which is now driving the nations of Europe forward. In the past, the same faith proved extremely dangerous.
If no one at the top of European politics will come forward with a better proposal for a peaceful, free, open and prosperous Europe, then we must hope that this time it is different.
It is very disappointing that there is so little reporting in the UK press of the scepticism of ordinary people in other European countries about the EU. Pro-EU commentators love to portray the British as weird and out of touch for being sceptical about the EU project, when in fact that scepticism is shared by huge numbers in the other EU countries.
Great points. Do you believe that the EU risks becoming simply an economic vehicle for Germany?
I remember that both Thatcher and the then Socialist President of France, Mitterrand had warned about this during reunification discussions with the US.
The good news for Britain is that now that federalism is so openly discussed and so central to the future of the EU, British politicians and media can no longer downplay it and pretend this is just the friendly trading club it hasn’t actually been since the nineties.
We shouldn’t be complacent, there may still be a fight coming, but I do not believe the British public will ever accept being part of a federal Europe, no matter what dreadful scaremongering the Europhiles throw at us. (For example the 3 1/2 million jobs which “depend on the EU”, which of course depend on trade with EU countries and would require a Cuba-style trade embargo to be lost). I also think the politicians know that. The only realistically forseeable future for us is out of the EU.