Re: How the EU turned O'Leary into its servant// WAS Re: Irish motormouth for hire?
Reading it with the eyes of a "recipient" however, I see that it is rather hard to tell what I am driving at.
Most recipients probably do not know the background facts, viz that:
a) O'Leary had had a favourable ECJ judgement and b) he had promised to campaign in Ireland in favour of the Lisbon treaty. I see you also cut off the original message from John which gave out this news item and which I was responding to. Perhaps it would be easier to understand if it were prefaced as below. Do you think it worth re-circulating, or would everybody on your list have known and understood anyway?
How the EU turned O'Leary into its servant// WAS Re: Irish motormouth for hire?
Background facts:
The CEO of Ryanair, Michael O'Leary a) recently had a favourable ECJ judgement, surprisingly, in view of how he had been at loggerheads for years with the EU institutions; and b) he had just promised to campaign in Ireland in favour of the Lisbon treaty.
John Kelly asked "Is this a case of bribery?"
Here is a response from Torquil Dick-Erikson:
Of course! But it is not so much bribery as EXTORTION.
This is a cautionary tale for all British and Irish business leaders.
Was the ECJ judgement on the discount O'Leary had received from the Belgian state unreasonable or not? Without knowing the details of this particular judgement, we can most likely assume it was quite reasonable. O'Leary's method of asking for a subsidy from local chambers of commerce etc in return for bringing planeloads of tourists into their cities, is quite reasonable. This was attacked by Air France a while back, as an illicit "State subsidy".
In reality, it would be akin to a state-owned hotel paying a bus company to provide a courtesy shuttle service to and from a nearby airport. It is quite reasonable to consider this as a form of promotion for the local businesses that profit from the flow of passengers that Ryan Air brings in, rather than as an unfair State subsidy that distorts free competition.
But this judgement in his favour would surely not have been granted if he had not played ball, if he had - say - decided to campaign alongside Declan Ganley, or even - heaven forbid! - to make a contribution to UKIP's
2009 election campaign! If he had done that, the decision would most likely have gone the other way. It would have been an unjust decision, on the merits of the case, but that is secondary or indeed irrelevant to this "European" way of thinking. The fact is that they hold your destiny in the palm of their hands, and they have little compunction about squeezing you till you do what they want.
So this is not O'Leary saying to the EU state-in-the-making "give me something that I am not entitled to, and I will support your treaty actively" (that would be bribery). No, this is the Eurocrats saying to him: "Unless you support us actively, we will not give you this thing that you are perfectly entitled to" (this is extortion).
It may sound extraordinary to English people. Yet it is fairly commonplace in continental Europe. For example, Saturday's editorial in the respected Italian daily Corriere della Sera, wrote, "The laws that need to be eliminated are the "useful" laws; useful to the political and administrative authorities, especially local authorities, for enabling them to impose their domination on the citizen. And allowing them to expect - even they do not ask for it openly - a brown envelope. In Italy, in order to exercise a legitimate right, you often have to hand over a brown envelope. It is of course the hyper-regulation that enables the politicians to do this. The hyper-regulation means that in order to engage in 101 ordinary sorts of activity necessary to run a business, you need a permit, an authorisation, a licence from the state authority. Without the permit, you are an illegal operator. So the bureaucrat has you over a barrel. Either you "make it worth his while" to speed up your paperwork, or you can wait till the cows come home.
This is the normal state of affairs in continental Europe. They have never known any better, and it is what most people expect and have learnt to adapt to, since birth. British people are unaccustomed to working in this way. That is why they have to convert us to their way of doing things, or as they would say, to "harmonise" us. The flood of unreasonable and vexatious regulations flooding out of Brussels serve precisely this purpose, to put the creator of wealth under the thumb of the bureaucrat. Our bureaucratic enforcers are still British, and run around enforcing the regulations eagerly and zealously, but being British have not yet woken up to the possibilities of personal enrichment that the system offers to them.
Doubtless once Lisbon is in place Brussels will start a unified "EU civil service" and so our British enforcers will be joined by Belgian, Greek, etc colleagues, who will soon teach them how to work the system. "The laws are something we apply to our enemies. For our friends we interpret them", as an Italian Prime Minister said famously 100 years ago. So British business people will soon learn, like O'Leary has learnt, that if they want to get ahead, the first people they must please are not the customers, but the enforcers.
We can fairly assume that it was made clear to O'Leary, or he worked it out for himself, that unless he campaigned to support the Lisbon treaty in Ireland, the ECJ and other EU regulatory authorities would have made his life impossible, would have ruined his business, most of which is in the EU and under their jurisdiction, and - as "collateral damage" - would have destroyed the "low-cost" airline sector - not that they would care much about consumers or indeed businesses being favoured by low-cost flights.
Let this be a lesson to all the UK industrialists and captains of industry who are foolishly supporting Britain's enthralment to the EU. The lesson that we must ram home to them is this: Once Lisbon is ratified throughout, and the lid of the new EU state has been firmly screwed on, with us inside, our captains of industry, the movers and shakers of the boardrooms of British big business, will discover to their dismay that they are living in a totally different and unfamiliar political, economic and business environment. They will find that from now on, they will be living and working in a world where it will no longer be them calling the shots; politicians will no longer be consulting them as to the policies best suited for business; it will no longer be the case that competition, the market, the consumer, decides which business shall succeed and which shall fail. No, it will be the politicians who decide which businesses shall succeed and which shall go to the wall, and they will not decide on market criteria, they will not reward the best and most efficient businesses, the ones that make the best widget at the keenest price. They will favour the business that is most "friendly" to them, ie that gives them the most cash or other favours. And they will enforce their decisions by manipulation of the hyper-regulations which like a thousand liliputian ropes, bind businesses and are used to control and command them. Our business leaders will wake up to find that they have become the PLAYTHINGS OF POLITICIANS. In the EU and continental tradition, it is the economics that is at the service of the politics. Business people have to suck up to politicians all the time.
In our Anglo-Saxon - and Anglo-Celtic - tradition, it is the politics that must be at the service of the economics. Politicians see their role as providing a framework that will enable business to prosper. That is a basic difference between us and them, and is a major reason why the UK, and indeed Ireland which shares our tradition in this respect, cannot and must not be absorbed into the nascent EU state. If we are, then our business culture will be destroyed and replaced with theirs. As is already happening indeed. With Lisbon the process will become irreversible.
This is the message that we must convey to all the boardrooms of Britain. If we can do it quickly, we may be able to get some of them to support us in time for the June election. Torquil
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