MILIBAND IN SEARCH OF AN ECONOMIC POLICY

Ed Miliband appears to be searching through Labour's post-war
redistributive election manifestos of economic ideas,
which he hopes will resonate with his core vote and allow him to
scrape into Number 10.

All of his proposals have the hallmark of a command and control
economy, based on more public spending and escalating debt.
With the exception of Germany this would seem to be the case
throughout much of the EU, where the increasing burden of
state spending is destroying enterprise and growth.

Mr Miliband and other leaders of all political persuasions should
reflect on Angela Merkel's oft repeated mantra. "The EU has 7%
of the world's population, 25% of its GDP and 50% of its social
spending." Without the political will significantly to reduce the size
of the state, its appetite to consume an ever growing proportion of
GDP will have predictable consequences.

       TIME TO JUNK JUNCKER

The loss of Angela Merkel's support over the appointment
of the next EU President must not weaken David Cameron's
resolve to make the appointment transparent and democratic.
The Prime Minister insists that for the EU to thrive it should be 
led by those who respect the sovereign state and the need to
streamline the suffocating, unaccountable and federalist
Brussels bureaucracy, objectives ignored by the former
Luxembourg prime minister.

If successful in his candidacy Claude Juncker will surely
ignore these imperatives, as the EU peers into the deflationary
abyss, supporting 50% of global social spending on the strength 
of 1% growth. A tipping point has been reached in the UK's
relationship with the EU and the Prime Minister must do more
than mouth platitudes, promising the impossible of repatriating
legislative powers back to Westminster.

Should this federalist face from the past become president, David
Cameron should act on his threat to bring to bring forward to 2016 the
referendum on UK membership of the EU, which is fast developing all the
characteristics of a full-blown federal state.

UNWELCOME US INFLUENCE

OBARMA MOVES TO INFlUENCE UK EU MEMBERSHIP

AND SCOTTISH REFERENDUM 


Barack Obama's intervention over Britain's future EU membership
and Scottish independence is ill-informed and inappropriate. A free-
enterprise economy functioning in an open, representative democracy
led to the rise of the United States as the pre-eminent global power.
It has underpinned the defence and economies of Western countries
since the Second World War.

These values represent everything that the EU is not. Its Commission,
far from representing the will of the people, represents 
an unelected and unaccountable elite. The introduction of  the deeply

flawed single currency, the monumentally wasteful Common 
Agricultural Policy, largely unaudited capital transfers to the 26
recipient countries funded by Germany and the UK, are manifestly
antithetical to the economic and democratic ideals that the US has 
always stood for.

However, in intruding into the question of Britain's continuing
membership of the EU and the Scottish referendum, 
President Obama reflects a possible drift of the US Government
into the kind of EU mindset that Republicans fear. For economic,
not least ideological, and other reasons, Mr Obama may have 
come into line with the social, political and economic values of
the US's largest trading partner, using its "special relationship"
with the UK as a convenient means to an end.

This is not without its risks. With all Western economies 
experiencing, at best, weak growth and a continuing rise
in welfare spending, how long before the EU begins to
insinuate its social objectives into US policy as a quid pro
quo for trade, with predictable economic and geo-political
consequences?