What have we come to, when some 98% of citizens think, “There’s nothing we can do anyway,” when a Supreme Court rules that Members of Parliament acted unconstitutionally by surrendering national sovereignty to the EU in Brussels, or when everyone seems to be accustomed to the fact that the “EU democracy deficit” has become so big that it has replaced democracy altogether?
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Credit Peace to all those in the Europe who made it happen including the NATO
And while we must never take this for granted, the first purpose of the European Union – to secure peace – has been achieved and we should pay tribute to all those in the EU, alongside NATO, who made that happen.
Deliver prosperity or else
For us, the European Union is a means to an end – prosperity, stability, the anchor of freedom and democracy both within Europe and beyond her shores – not an end in itself. We insistently ask: How? Why? To what end?But all this doesn’t make us somehow un-European.
Fix systematic problems like its lack of competitiveness and democratic accountability or else
The problems in the Eurozone are driving fundamental change in Europe.Second, there is a crisis of European competitiveness, as other nations across the world soar ahead. And third, there is a gap between the EU and its citizens which has grown dramatically in recent years. And which represents a lack of democratic accountability and consent that is – yes – felt particularly acutely in Britain.
- First, the Eurozone. The Union is changing to help fix the currency – and that has profound implications for all of us, whether we are in the single currency or not.
- Second, while there are some countries within the EU which are doing pretty well. Taken as a whole, Europe’s share of world output is projected to fall by almost a third in the next two decades. This is the competitiveness challenge – and much of our weakness in meeting it is self-inflicted. As Chancellor Merkel has said – if Europe today accounts for just over 7 per cent of the world’s population, produces around 25 per cent of global GDP and has to finance 50 per cent of global social spending, then it’s obvious that it will have to work very hard to maintain its prosperity and way of life.
- Third, there is a growing frustration that the EU is seen as something that is done to people rather than acting on their behalf. And this is being intensified by the very solutions required to resolve the economic problems. People are increasingly frustrated that decisions taken further and further away from them mean their living standards are slashed through enforced austerity or their taxes are used to bail out governments on the other side of the continent.
The biggest danger to the European Union comes not from those who advocate change, but from those who denounce new thinking as heresy. In its long history Europe has experience of heretics who turned out to have a point.
European Union, fit for the 21st Century.
- The first: competitiveness. I want us to be at the forefront of transformative trade deals with the US, Japan and India as part of the drive towards global free trade. And I want us to be pushing to exempt Europe’s smallest entrepreneurial companies from more EU Directives.That means creating a leaner, less bureaucratic Union, relentlessly focused on helping its member countries to compete.In a global race, can we really justify the huge number of expensive peripheral European institutions?Can we justify a Commission that gets ever larger?Can we carry on with an organisation that has a multi-billion pound budget but not enough focus on controlling spending and shutting down programmes that haven’t worked?
- The second principle should be flexibility. We need a structure that can accommodate the diversity of its members – North, South, East, West, large, small, old and new. Some of whom are contemplating much closer economic and political integration. And many others, including Britain, who would never embrace that goal. We must not be weighed down by an insistence on a one size fits all approach which implies that all countries want the same level of integration. I say it merely reflects the reality of the European Union today. 17 members are part of the Eurozone. 10 are not. 26 European countries are members of Schengen – including four outside the European Union – Switzerland, Norway, Liechtenstein and Iceland. 2 EU countries – Britain and Ireland – have retained their border controls.S ome members, like Britain and France, are ready, willing and able to take action in Libya or Mali. Others are uncomfortable with the use of military force. By the same token, the members of the Eurozone should accept that we, and indeed all Member States, will have changes that we need to safeguard
our interests and strengthen democratic legitimacy. The European Treaty commits the Member States to “lay the foundations of an ever closer union among the peoples of Europe”. This has been consistently interpreted as applying not to the peoples but rather to the states and institutions compounded by a European Court of Justice that has consistently supported greater centralisation. - My third principle is that power must be able to flow back to Member States, not just away from them. This was promised by European Leaders at Laeken a decade ago. Countries are different. They make different choices. We cannot harmonise everything.
- My fourth principle is democratic accountability: we need to have a bigger and more significant role for national parliaments. It is national parliaments, which are, and will remain, the true source of real democratic legitimacy and accountability in the EU. Those are the Parliaments which instil proper respect – even fear – into national leaders.We need to recognise that in the way the EU does business.
- My fifth principle is fairness: whatever new arrangements are enacted for the Eurozone, they must work fairly for those inside it and out. That will be of particular importance to Britain. As I have said, we will not join the single currency. But there is no overwhelming economic reason why the single currency and the single market should share the same boundary, any more than the single market and Schengen.
EU, under the terms of the Lisbon Treaty, is basically undemocratic.
Today, public disillusionment with the EU is at an all time high. There are several reasons for this. People feel that the EU is heading in a direction that they never signed up to. They resent the interference in our national life by what they see as unnecessary rules and regulation. And they wonder what the point of it all is. There is, indeed, much more that needs to be done on this front. But people also feel that the EU is now heading for a level of political integration that is far outside Britain’s comfort zone. They see Treaty after Treaty changing the balance between Member States and the EU. And note they were never given a say. EU members of parliament were not elected according to the principle of electoral equality, in other words, one man one vote, but rather according to national contingents, meaning that a Maltese MEP represents 67,000 Maltese, a Swedish MEP has a constituency of 455,000 Swedes and in Germany, the ratio is 1 to 857,000.” By the EU reform arranged now the disparity even still increases – on the factor 12.8. Besides the parliament is without any competence and competency anyway. Consider dire state of the European fiscal union. First, it meant the economic destruction of most of the southern European countries. Indeed, this process is already far advanced. Thanks to their membership of the eurozone, peripheral countries such as Greece and Portugal – and to an increasing extent Spain and Italy – are undergoing a process of forcible deindustrialisation. Their economic sovereignty has been obliterated; They will provide cheap labour, raw materials, agricultural produce and a ready market for the manufactured goods and services provided by the far more productive and efficient northern Europeans. Their political leaders will, like the hapless ones of Greece and Italy, lose all political legitimacy run by G&S allumni. While these nations relapse into pre-modern economic systems, Germany is busy turning into a so-called dynamic and productive economy eventually also enslaving its citizens to provide their goods (and working time) for little money. The culture of debate had died in this country, he continued; real discussions are taboo. Mrs. Merkel and her finance minister just follow the dictates of the markets in order to save the “euro homunculus,” and this euro lies like a shroud over Spain, Italy, and France. Mrs. Merkel, with “blind terracotta soldiers” marching behind her—and not just from her own party but all others except ironically the communists —will comply with requests for aid until Germany is finished, he wrote. Despite the grumbling of a few Germans who understand the signs on the wall, the bail-outs continue, because they guarantee big money and cooperation return. Those real EU rulers and Brussels EUbureaucracy have come very close to realising Bismarck’s dream of an economic empire stretching from central Europe to the Eastern Mediterranean.This is the final realisation of the dream that animated the founders of the Common Market – which is one reason why so many prominent Europeans have privately welcomed the eurozone catastrophe, labelling it a “beneficial crisis”. It is a loose loose situation for all Europeans.
We need a referendum after the EU made compatible to democracy.
“It will be an in-out referendum. And when that choice comes, you will have an important choice to make about our country’s destiny.” UKIP leader Niger Farage said his party “regards today’s speech as its greatest achievement” so far: “No longer can the case for British withdrawal be confined to the margins,” Farage, a member of the European Parliament, said in an e-mailed statement. “The genie is out of the bottle.” The EU has quietly completed its development of the economic dictatorship and Union statehood entitled by its self-adopted Lisbon Treaty/EU Constitution rejected by the few Europeans given the opportunity to vote for it.