biographer stated “that parliament in 1971 and the country in 1975 was hoodwinked into signing up for more than it was ever told”.
campaign and who at that time was pro-European; said 'the Labour government's referendum of 1975 was a fraud perpetrated by civil servants with the [then] government's connivance, designed to keep us in but also (wrongly) to conceal as far as possible the countervailing disadvantages of membership'.
German people to the EMU] comes the following gem which exemplifies the EU’s Master’s definition of democracy.
Q.: But citizens do not understand what the politicians do.
A.: "There is a communications problem, apparently.
How are the opinion polls in the Netherlands?"
Q.: More than half wants to keep the Guilder, according to a recent poll.
A.: "Well, OK. Then, politicians should have the courage to take decisions,
Q.: Excuse me?
A.: "With the consent of Parliament of course."
The Lisbon Yes man with links to Libya
Stay with me for five short hops, and I will take you from Colonel Gaddafi and Abdelbaset Al Megrahi, the Lockerbie bomber, to the ‘Ireland for Europe’ campaign -- more, to questions about who is backing this slick and well-funded Yes-to-Lisbon propaganda outfit being run by Pat Cox, an Irish former president of the European Parliament who has turned himself into a corporate lobbyist in Brussels.
The connections will illuminate the sort of company with which the Irish Yes campaign feels comfortable.
Start at one. The mass-murderer Megrahi has just been set free from prison in Scotland and returned to Libya.
Two, last week Jack Straw, the British Secretary of State for Justice, admitted for the first time that a Libyan oil deal with BP was an essential part of the government’s decision to included Megrahi in a prisoner transfer deal.
Three, the oil deal was worth $900million and struck with BP six weeks after Megrahi was included in the prisoner transfer agreement. A report in the Telegraph at the weekend said that BP had warned the British government that the failure to include Megrahi in the deal could damage BP’s interests, but BP denied actually mentioning Megrahi.
Four, up until a week ago, the chairman of BP was the former Irish European Commissioner, Peter Sutherland. In 2004, Sir Mark Allen, a Middle East expert, resigned from the British intelligence service MI6 to join Sutherland’s BP for £200,000 a year. Six months before joining BP, Sir Mark chaired a secret meeting with Colonel Gaddafi’s spy chief in London, which included discussion of the Megrahi case. It turns out it was Mr Sutherland’s ex-spook who then lobbied the British justice secretary. He urged his old friend Mr Straw to speed up an agreement over prisoner transfers, which had been expected to lead to Megrahi’s return, to avoid jeopardising a trade deal with Libya worth up to £15billion to Mr Sutherland’s BP.
Five, Sutherland is a patron of Ireland for Europe, of which Pat Cox is campaign director. The organisation’s website does not disclose the extent or source of its funding nor whether fabulously-rich Sutherland has contributed financially to the cause. Whether he has or not Sutherland has -- and if he hasn't, Cox's corporate clients ought to be asking some questions about Cox's powers of persuasion -- his position in Ireland as a former Attorney General and European Commission is worth plenty to Cox's propaganda campaign, so the 'Ireland for Europe' Yes campaign has embraced him.
Me, personally, the only way I could embrace someone who worked to get a deal worth billions resulting in the release of the man who killed 270 men, women and children in a fireball over Scotland is if I were wearing the kind of kit you’d wear to unclog London sewers. However, Cox and his Yes-to-Lisbon colleagues appear not to mind the smell coming off the BP recently-ex-chairman.
I suppose that since Sutherland is now one of the richest bankers on the planet Cox is willing to hold his nose. That is the sort of pass you can get when you are also chairman of Goldman Sachs International, part of the globally-greedy Goldman’s which has famously and accurately been denounced in America as ‘a vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity relentlessly jabbing its blood funnel into anything that smells like money’. Perhaps, since Mr Cox is a professional Brussels lobbyist running two lobbying firms which he has kept unregistered, maybe he doesn’t notice the smell.
===========
The Case for EMU: More than Money
by Peter Sutherland
From Foreign Affairs, January/ February 1997
Peter Sutherland is Chairman and Managing Director of Goldman Sachs International. He was
Director General of the World Trade Organization from 1993 until 1996 and European Union
Commissioner from 1985 until 1989. In the intensifying debate over the prospects for European
economic and monetary union, there is danger of losing sight of the most fundamental fact about
EMU. Like everything else in the push for European integration, it is essentially a political
undertaking. To underline that truth is not to deny the compelling economic rationale for EMU but to
emphasize that there is more at stake.
The economic rationale is based on the inherent logic of Europe's single-market strategy; EMU
may well be essential to the single market's survival. But it has also become a test of both the
European Union and the political commitment of its 15 member states, one that goes beyond the
technicalities of the project. If Europe fails the test, the consequences for integration will be
serious.
Assuming that monetary union will begin as scheduled on January 1, 1999, it is still too soon to
know which of the EU's member states will qualify to take part in the first wave; that decision will
depend on how each nation's key economic indicators develop. But there is already a growing
sense that it could be a substantial minority, perhaps even a significant majority, of the member
states.
EMUs critics continue to argue that it is a bad and damaging idea. But the skeptics have changed
their tune. They no longer claim that monetary union will be a failure because most member states
will be unable to meet the criteria for economic convergence that the 1991-92 Maastricht treaty set
for admittance; they instead predict that the member states will realize that EMU is vital to the
political enterprise of European integration and cannot be allowed to fail, and will therefore fudge or
even disregard the criteria. Either way, in their view, the result is the same: something called EMU
will happen, but it will be botched, and will prove to be a grave mistake for the European Union.
The critics maintain that EMU will not work because the member states will fail to reform their rigid
labor markets and burdensome welfare systems. Such reforms are exceptionally difficult, to be
sure, and will be resisted by vested interests. France's current attempts to solve structural problems
relating to social security and public employment and Germany's push to modify pension and sick
leave benefits are meeting the resistance one would expect. But predicting that those efforts will not
succeed seems unnecessarily pessimistic. Their inevitability is widely recognized, as evidenced by
privatization programs under way virtually everywhere in Europe. There is also new realism and a
sense of the need for constructive engagement on these issues among many of Europe's trade
unionists.
Above all, the competitive liberalization of the global economy will require such reforms even absent
EMU. Would the social partners in the German economy, for example, choose to commit collective
suicide rather than carry out . . .
Posts
