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All over the place ---This is superb!

Glad he's back on form!

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EUREFERENDUM Blog
Wednesday, August 20, 2008
Autres directions


A perspicacious Guardian today notes that the EU is in as much
disarray about how to handle the looming recession as it is over how
to confront Russia's belligerence in the Caucasus.

Drawing on the experience so many of us have had of baffling French
road signs, it suggests that "toutes directions", the often confusing
signpost at crossroads in French provincial towns, just about sums up
eurozone government responses so far.

Actually, we can do better than that. Attempting to find our way to
Strasbourg one day, driving through the by-ways of Alsace completely
lost, we came to a T-junction in a small town, unmarked on our map.
Witnessed by my increasingly acerbic co-editor, then one of my
backseat drivers passengers, we were utterly confounded by a single
sign offering the choice between "toutes directions" and "autres
directions". That, it seemed to us, was the most appropriate paradigm
for the European Union.

Returning to The Guardian, it tells us that France, as holder of the
EU presidency, is effectively pushing for a concerted series of
activist, counter-cyclical measures to be adopted when finance
ministers meet in Nice in the middle of next month - even if it means
busting the bloc's three percent budget deficit limit.

In this predictably - it can count on support from its "Club Med"
partners in Italy and Spain but Germany, determined to maintain
fiscal discipline and avoid a repeat of the 1970s, is resolutely
opposed. And so is the EU commission, while the UK is out on a limb,
together with the Irish and the Nordics (several limbs, actually).

Although it retails a sorry tale of confusion, it is a pity though
that the paper cannot see the bigger picture. It is not only the
"looming recession" and the question of "how to confront Russia's
belligerence in the Caucasus" that finds the EU in disarray. The
impending clash over the Common Agricultural Policy will point up yet
more disarray, while the continued impasse over GM crop approvals,
the disagreement over biofuels and the energy policy generally, are
all examples of the EU haring off in "toutes directions".

In fact, from the experience of the Common Fisheries Policy
branded by its own commissioner as "immoral" - to the waste policy,
immigration and high level initiatives in the Middle East, nothing
the EU touches ever works. It leaves behind it a trail of wreckage,
disarray and confusion.

Never more has it ever been more urgent that we in the UK should be
looking for that sign which says, "autres directions".

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Posted by Richard North