London, England-David Cameron’s government experienced the largest ever Conservative revolt over Europe in the House of Commons on Monday with 82 Conservative MPs defying his orders to vote against holding a referendum on Britain’s membership in the European Union (EU). It was double the number of MPs who last rebelled in 1993 when 41 of them defied John Major over the Maastricht Treaty which gave us the political structures of the European Union we see today and the foundation on which the Euro was created.
A ‘yes’ vote now, we are told, would have meant abandoning our neighbours in their hour of need. You can read this as meaning any hint of the UK pulling out of the EU, would create panic in the markets, banks might fail, other EU sceptic countries would all want to pull out, and the whole thing would collapse like the house of cards that it is.
The Treaty of Rome in 1958 established the European Economic Community which was the initial economic /trade co-operation between the large economies in Europe and since then we have had treaties raining down on us like dead frogs, each one creating new institutions and charters that move power away from national electorates to a centralized European Parliament.
Promoted under the Labour government, the most insidious of these, The Lisbon Treaty, caused a great furore over what it meant for the future of independent British policy making. Yet out of the glare of the official ceremony, more of our sovereignty was quietly signed away into law a day later by Gordon Brown – a successor rather than an elected Prime Minister. Plus as another parting present, the outgoing Labour chancellor, Alistair Darling, cut us a damning deal that left the UK exposed to the first sovereign debt crisis with the Greek bailout.
David Cameron has consistently spoken the language of Euro scepticism but his actions seem to belie his words. He broke his election pledge to hold a referendum on the Lisbon Treaty, but to be fair to him, the horse had already bolted as every nation in the Union approved the treaty by the time he came into office. And when Labour put us in the mud on the Greek bailout, our new Conservative chancellor, then just shadow chancellor, objected, yet we are still on the hook for £6.5B.
Cameron is also happy to surround himself with pro-European ministers, even those who have done very public u-turns like the former Conservative opposition leader and now Foreign Secretary, William Hague. In 2007, he told us that Conservatives would always fight for people to have their say on Europe, yet on Monday he voted ‘no’ for the referendum. A poll in a recent uGov survey indicated 62% of us would very much like to have a referendum. So much for representative government.
Having watched much of the 7-hour debate prior to the vote, I can report some pride in seeing the so-called ‘rebels’ standing up for principle and the promises they made to their constituents when they ran for office. These are British patriots who understand how government ought to be run , namely that laws should be fought over and won by the majority in the house, instead of being imposed by a central bureaucracy; that the public can throw out their representatives and the polices they promote via elections instead of them being imposed by a bureaucracy they can’t throw out; that the full control of money, taxes and tariffs are controlled by polices their elected government decide and not by some foreign powers that spend in ways we do not approve.
But these brave Conservative souls were in the minority. It was even more disgusting to watch the Labour opposition vote as a party with a ‘no’ instead of giving their Euro-sceptic MPs a free vote. The purpose of this tactic was to let Cameron hang out to dry and make the Conservative party look in disarray. Politics is a nasty business.
It is also an immoral business. The UK Telegraph newspaper recently gave us a long list of the European Assembly gravy train abuse of staff perks and expenses, nepotism and general waste of taxpayer money. Here’s just a taster out of a £5.4B parliamentary assembly administrative budget:
£67m - what MEPs (Members of the European Parliament) can claim in ‘daily subsistence’ and ‘general expenditure’ without any receipts or proof of expenditure
£150m – what is costs to move the EU parliament from Brussels to Strasbourg to a sitting once a month as a symbol of Franco-German reconciliation
£26m – to larger offices for MEPs
£15.5m – the cost of a visitor centre where kids get to role play a virtual experience of life as an MEP.
What kid wouldn’t want a piece of this when they’ve grown up? After all the name of the game is entitlement and who cares where the magic money is coming from. No wonder Klaus Welle, the parliament’s secretary general tried to block this information getting out on the grounds that it would ‘ disrupt decision making’. Now would that be a decision to dine at the Ritz or your local brassiere?
There simply isn’t enough room in one article to cite all the shady contracts, pay-offs to relatives and general thievery, but let me say that a lot of the activity closely resembles the charges of corruption we now see coming out of Greece and Italy. In other words, when you bring a bunch of different cultures together and give them a stack of money, they are going to revert to the modus operandi they are used to, rather than the rules set out by the EU.
And this malfeasance applies to only the admin budget. When you start to look at the cost of the operation of the entire EU, which is where the serious money of lending to individual members countries, subsidies and so on goes, the UK alone, and remember we are not in the Eurozone (EZ - the Euro currency union) spends £42B a year in direct costs. Add on the indirect cost, like the £16.5B p/a cost in taxes and food bills arising from the Common Agricultural Policy or the Fisheries Policy at a cost of £4.7B p/a in lost jobs and reduced catches, and you are starting to look at real money - £77B p/a or just under £1,300 per man woman and child in the UK. Other than having some very well fed MEPs and their families in the European Assembly, I would like to know exactly what we get in return. Forty percent of our trade we are told. Yet just in trade of goods alone we had a £45B deficit last year.
The founding of EU and the EZ was based on wrong principles. How do you bring a bunch of disparate cultures, agendas, fiscal and other systems together and expect them to sing off the same hymn sheet? It started with the common market where trade became open and easier for all. It should have stopped there, but instead morphed into a political union, then a currency union which was never based on common tax law and fiscal norms which is the necessary foundation for a common currency to work efficiently. This latter point means giving up your sovereignty and how do you convince 27 countries to do that?
Just as I am ending this article, news is breaking that a one trillion Euro stability fund and a 50% haircut for banks holding Greek debt plus something called ‘special purpose vehicles’ to ‘attract resources’ from public and private investors has been agreed. Read the last as more derivatives (that got the world into financial Armageddon in the first place) that governments and banks will have to back. More magic money.
Let me leave you with a cute scene between the German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Nicholas Sarkozy in one of their press conferences over the last day or so. When asked if Italy can be trusted to make good on their planned austerity reforms to enable them to get EU support, they both glanced at each other with full on smirks on their faces. This and the fact that Sarkozy pleaded with journalists ‘don’t ask me any complicated questions’ after this last spate of agreements, shows that the gloves are off, a lot of noses are going to get bloodied and they don’t even care to hide in it diplomatic responses any more.
