Britannia Radio

17 Sept 09 The Bumbler Wins A Second Term   So Mr Barroso has won a second term as president of the European Commission.  And the British Tories helped him win, saying he was the best man for the job.  Allow me to disagree, at least up to a point.  Barroso is an unconvincing bumbler.  Indeed, the Tories may argue with some justification that he was the least worst choice.   Certainly he is no Delors or Prodi, thank goodness.  He talks a lot, but does little.  The real worry about Barroso is that he fails to exercise any real control over the rest of the Commission and their various foolhardy and economically damaging ideas for yet more regulation.    How else did we have inflicted on us regulations during his first term which bans ordinary light bulbs, is ruining horticulture by new pesticide controls, demands the hopelessly uneconomic tagging of sheep, bans the industrial use of mercury, enforces idiotic CO2 emission controls, prevents junior doctors working long enough to have the lives of others put safely in their hands…the list goes on and on? Most of these damaging madcap interventions in our lives could and should have been strangled at birth.  But Barroso is a bureaucrat and lives by the mantra that he has authority to control the millions now living in the EU – despite not one person ever voting for him.   He will now appoint his own new Commission from the appointees offered by the member states, and we should watch closely which of the last crummy lot survives. He also has control of an annual budget of £110 billion, or about 96 billion euros.  That is a huge amount of money. Allow me to remind you just how vast a billion of anything really is, and I am grateful to an unknown American for having worked it out: A.    A billion seconds ago it was 1959. B    A billion minutes ago Jesus was alive. C    A billion hours ago our ancestors were living in the Stone Age. D    A billion days ago no-one walked on the earth on two feet. E.   A billion pounds sterling ago was only about 48 hours at the rate Brown’s government is now spending our money. Mr Barroso will be presiding over an expenditure of a billion pounds every 72 hours or so, knowing that some 80 percent of it will never be properly accounted for.  Worse, he still won’t do anything significant to stop the EU’s institutionalised fraud and corruption.  He has had the power to crack down for five years and virtually nothing has been done.  My conclusion some time ago was that the bureaucrats preferred it that way. So watch, very carefully, who replaces Siim Kallas, the Moscow-educated former communist Estonian commissioner, who was himself the subject of serious corruption charges when he was president of the  Estonian central bank in the 1990s.   Kallas was the Commissioner responsible for fighting fraud and corruption between 2004 and 2009 - a task he singularly failed to achieve.  Indeed he even presided over the re-appointment of F-H Bruner, the equally incompetent German head of the EU’s Fraud Investigation branch (OLAF), despite two eminently better candidates being endorsed by the European Parliament.  I know.  I was there.  I also know why the two were in cahoots, and it is not a pretty story. Let us not forget all this when Mr Cameron next fudges the issue of a referendum on the Lisbon Treaty.   Nor when he presents his manifesto and seeks our votes next year.  The British people remain imprisoned in the EU by politicians who had no mandate and no right to give away our sovereignty.   The fight must go on.  At least we now know who leads the enemy for the next five years – if they last that long. The collapse of the euro may yet save us all, despite the inevitably messy fall-out.  (end)     To respond to, or comment on this Email, please email ashley.mote@btconnect.com Click www.ashleymote.co.uk to visit the site now.