DAVID CAMERON'S EU FANTASY


The British genius for putting a positive gloss on abject failure
continues with David Cameron's predicted, humiliating defeat
over Jean-Claude Juncker's appointment. The Prime Minister's
ill-thought-out strategy for securing the early repatriation of
sovereign powers back to Westminster was always doomed.
It could only have worked if Angela Merkel and her colleagues
had believed that there was the real possibility of Britain
withdrawing from the EU and they clearly did not. Mr Cameron
waved the white flag as he was brought to heel by an
unaccountable political elite, whose fine words of
reconciliation about the critical need for reform are
all but worthless.

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?

INFORMED COMMENT

                                         JOHN BARKER MA

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REALPOLITIK AND TOKENISM

President Putin has clearly flouted the

international rule of law by annexing the Ukraine.

He is putting in place a strategy of real politik for

rebuilding Russia's former empire.This could well

be through the evential annexation of the twelve

countries where Russian is the main secondary

language and the insistence that the 'human

rights' of its speakers must be protected. The
similarities with Hitler's policy over sudetenland
in 1936 are stark.
 

The Russian President is assisted in planning his

aggressive domino effect by impotence and

indecision:policy paralysis caused by the

increasing dependency of the EU's major

economies on Russian trade and, of course,its

growing stranglehold on energy supplies.

 

At the same time, the inevitable schism that will

open up between the EU and the US on what to

do about the invasion of a sovereign country plays

into Putin's hands.

 

The Ukraine is the first piece in the jigsaw and the

question is not if, but when, others will follow in

Russian expansion, facilicitated by vacuous talk

and empty threats.

 

WIT OF ONE WHO WOULD BE LEADER

 

The changing name of the former secretary

of state for energy from Anthony Wedgwood

Benn, 2nd Viscount Stansgate to plain Tony

Benn, always raised a few eyebrows. Attempting

to present himself as a working-class warrior

and not a son of privelege could tend to

detract from something that never changed:

his rapier-like wit.

 

He once remarked "Clement Attlee had as

much charisma as a mouse. He was absolutely

mono-syllabic. People say conversation is

supposed to be like a game of tennis, but with

Attlee it was like tossing biscuits to a dog."

It has been said of Tony Benn that he made

enemies and kept enemies. Not so with the

Tory Party. His extreme left-wing views were

a factor in Margaret Thatcher's victory at the

1979 general election and in the eighteen years

of Labour opposition that followed.