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Posts Tagged ‘The European Union’

This picture of the G8 Leaders sitting around a table together, is very symbolic because whilst they can arrange a meeting and deliver a conference, the one thing that they can’t do is deliver their electorates.

Solving the Euro crisis would be simple if either the Eurozone countries opted for a “United States of Europe” where all resources are pooled, both assets and liabilities or, Germany accepted ‘funding’ such a programme without such a structure. The real problem as the election of Hollande in France and the non-election of any kind of government in Greece demonstrates is that the average European voter is not prepared to face reality.

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I returned to the “Britain and the EU” theme recently only because of an article in The Economist on the subject of a proposed UK Referendum on the topic. I posted a comment against the article and as a result got some interesting replies. Often most replies on this topic are a waste of time because both the For and the Against mob consider their opposites heretics that should be burnt at the stake, never a basis for rational debate.

However sometimes, debate is possible and it teases out the various threads to the subject which is a good thing so the following are really various ‘one sided conversations’ which may work in covering some ground, this may or may not work, I offer it as is…

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Apparently the former ‘Dark Lord’, an European Groupie if ever there was, Peter Mandleson has put forward the idea that we should hold a UK Referendum on an IN or OUT basis. As someone wryly commented, a proposition that only a person no longer seeking elected office could make. Of course it is more likely that as the EU isn’t a burning issue with the British public, his guess is that confronted with a straight choice, they could be easily intimidated by tales of what they might lose by leaving the EU, a very Brussels stance if ever there was.

However and even for those of an “Visceral Anti-EU” posture, the fact that someone like Mandy proposes it, of itself might indicate that there is no need for an “IN/OUT” Referendum because the EU as we currently know it, is unlikely to survive it’s Nemesis the Euro.

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The French have that lovely expression: “Plus ça change plus c’est la même chose”- The more things change, the more they stay the same and I suspect that that is the case with the election of Francois Hollande as the new French President. The truth is that for all the noises and echoes of the election trail, as things currently stand, there is little prospect of significant change.

None of the key elements have changed, the problems are the same and frankly as the UK Coalition Government knows, having power under these circumstances is a bit of a poisoned chalice, being in Opposition is safer. The only problem then of course as in the case of Mr Hollande, is when you stop being the Opposition and are now in power ! Alors ! Merde and other such words…

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For an exercise in soft and weak minded liberalism, it would be hard to beat an editorial in The Independent that prattles on about youth unemployment. Whilst they sketch out some of the issues rather as plotting dots on a chart, they totally fail to join those dots up. The current levels of unemployment are distressing in all sorts of ways but what this Editorial like most politicians seem to miss is the key point about these figures…

This is not the disease, it is just a symptom of the real underlying ailment that is not local but global in nature. If you want to read it yourself, here is the link: http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/leading-articles/leading-article-we-allow-joblessness-to-rise-at-our-peril-7627537.html

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The reality is that to the majority of British people and no doubt like our elections to others, foreign Presidential/Government Elections are interesting but also “rather alien” in their own way too. This is how we mainly view the current French Presidential election from this side of the Channel. Of course this is not totally true for all inhabitants of these isles, we apparently have such a large and mainly young French population that they have their own representation !

As an Englishman I can speculate on who I favour but I don’t have an emotional attachment to any candidate nor a proper understanding of their political parties. Sarkozy seems always mercurial and often odd in his reactions, snubbing Cameron at an EU Summit and yet coming through whole heartedly over the Libya Campaign.

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I suppose and in often strange ways, we sometimes discover “the fatal flaw” in most ideas. Having started my commercial life as a designer concerned with engineering and production, there was a very amusing story about a “new mousetrap”, I will not bore you with the tale but the ‘punch line’ was quite simple:

The basic concept behind the design was obviously flawed and when called upon to deal with this, the designer instead of having a total rethink, just “improved” upon or refined his own flawed original concept. To engineers, this was all very amusing because it was something that we had to deal with on a daily basis and knew that it was far too easy to be led astray. I have an awful feeling that Scottish independence is the same…

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I was slightly amused by Chris Huhne giving an opinion on the motives of the “Tory Right Wing” with regard to the EU the other day but more than that, I also read a number of articles on Der Spiegel http://www.spiegel.de/international/ with regard to the current Euro Crisis which gives an interesting insight to some German thinking on the whole thing.

What struck me about these articles and however ‘reasonable in tone’ they are, the authors completely miss any basic understanding of a “British Perspective” which has been shaped over a long period of time and is largely influenced by us being “island races”. By the same token, I don’t suspect that we can easily understand Continental Europe with its contiguous land borders either that have shaped their present day views in both peace and war.

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There is a proposal by a UKIP Peer Lord Pearson of Rannoch to set up a House of Lords Committee to examine the value of the UK belonging to the European Union. It is envisaged that the membership of this committee would be made up of seven people, two “For”, two “Against”, two of no strong view on the matter and, an independent chairman.

The idea would be by diligent examination of the issues, it must be possible to arrive at a firm view, backed with facts that says that it is either “In” or “Against” the UK’s interests to be a member of the European Union. This is a fine ambition I might suggest but there are quite a number of obvious problems with the whole idea…

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For all the fuss over the EU, we really must concentrate on more important things like Christmas because the farce over last Friday, is emerging into a Pantomime in it’s own right. There was a LibDem MEP called Sharon Bowles who is chair of the European Parliament’s Committee on Economic and Monetary Affairs, declaring that she wished she could change her nationality to Irish to show support for the Euro – daft cow !

What made it all the funnier was she both looked and sounded like Julie Walters playing her role as “Mrs Overall” in the mock soap “Acorn Antiques”, I almost wet my pants watching the woman being interviewed, it was hilarious…if also slightly sad too.

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