Here is a man who apparently had a row with his wife at two o'clock in the morning. Perhaps to avoid the fight, he got in his car, drove off and bumped into a fire hydrant and a tree. Police checks showed there was no trace of alcohol or drugs in his system, and his dash away from home was so slow that the crash didn't even release the Cadillac's airbags. Sorry, but the only place in the world where that would add up to a wild incident is among the Mormons of Salt Lake City. If any other young, handsome, wildly rich and famous athlete crashed his car at a palm fringed paradise in the early hours of the morning, it is hardly likely he would have been driving at 30 mph, with zero alcohol and zero drugs in his blood. More, if you believe that the reason Woods was leaving home was because an argument with his wife was turning ugly, the only scandal would have been if it had been the wife who decided to flee at 2 a.m. The fact that Woods was the one to retreat and take the cuts on the face (wherever they came from) speaks well for him. And the women? As the old Duke of Portland once sighed on being told by his accountant he must give up his Italian pastry chef: 'What? Can't a fellow have a biscuit?' Just now, the Icelandic government and the Brussels eurocrats are getting ready to start negotiations for the accession of Iceland to the European Union. A chief negotiator has been appointed by Reykjavik and in October, Olli Rehn, who was then European Commissioner for Enlargement, dispatched a list of 2,500 questions to Iceland for the government to answer.This is all according to plan. The Icelandic economy collapsed last year in the most spectacular disaster of the global financial melt-down. Ever since, the empire builders of Brussels have been confident that the bankrupt and frightened Icelanders must finally be ready to exchange their independence for the ‘stability’ of EU membership. As the banks of Iceland went bust, and half the businesses and a quarter of private citizens faced insolvency, the European Commission quietly opened its diary and pencilled in Iceland’s entry for 2011. So what a set-back for the commission, and for the pro-EU government, that opposition to joining the EU is growing among Icelanders. Last month – on the day before David Cameron said there would be no referendum under a Tory government, that the British were now powerless to say No to Lisbon – an opinion poll was published in Reykjavik. It showed 54 percent of all Icelanders oppose membership, with just 29 percent in favour. This was the third opinion poll in a row showing a majority against EU membership. With every poll, the majority has increased. The Icelanders may have been scared out of their wits last year, but they are now climbing out from under the ruins of their prosperity and have decided that the most valuable thing they have left is their independence. They are not willing to trade it, not even for the possibility of a bail-out by the European Central Bank. Hjortur J. Gudmundsson, director of the free market think tank Veritas Iceland, says the people believe they can manage outside the EU: ‘That might be different if we had been in the EU for years and had no experience of being on the outside. But we have been on the outside and, despite some temporary economic difficulties we are facing, we have done very well for ourselves. We have been able to take our own decisions according to our own best interests.’ He said the decision to apply for membership was only made as part of a deal in forming a coalition government last April. The European Commission knows exactly how strong Icelandic resistance is to the EU, but it is going ahead with preparations for negotiations anyway. It appears that, as with the Irish referendums on Lisbon, 'No' is not an answer Brussels is willing to consider. The commission has staff at the EU delegation in Oslo monitoring the debate in Iceland, watching and translating news reports and political commentary, dispatching it all back to Brussels for analysis. Some Icelandic eurosceptics say the commission has observers in Reykjavik, monitoring political activities. Certainly the commission plans to open a full-time delegation there by the end of this month. Already EU officials such as Commissioner Rehn have been making appearances on Icelandic radio and television, explaining the ‘benefits’ of EU membership. At the same time, some of those who support joining the EU claim those who insist on Icelandic independence are xenophobes. The European Commission has a propaganda budget of over £2bn a year, and the eurocrats know how to use it. They know how to be underhanded, too. The 2,500 questions which Brussels told the government it must answer were questions on Iceland’s legal system, foreign affairs, politics, and more. The answers the government has just sent back to Brussels run to 8,870 pages in total. But Brussels submitted the questions in English, and the pro-EU government answered in English – publishing none of it in the Icelandic language, so many Icelanders cannot read what their own government has been saying about them. Even English-speaking Icelanders complain the questions were written in near-unreadable ‘bureaucratic’ English. I asked Ragnar Arnalds, a eurosceptic former Finance Minister, if the people were angry about this. ‘We do not use words like “angry” here,’ he said. ‘We say the people “criticise” the decision.’ What really sets the Icelanders against the EU is the question of handing their fishing grounds over to control by the EU. Iceland has an economic zone of 200 nautical miles, making an exclusive maritime territory seven times the size of the country itself. Fish represent one-third of Iceland’s exports. The idea of handing over control of all this to EU sovereignty is something even Stefan Haujur Johannesson, the government’s new chief negotiator on accession, has told me is unthinkable: ‘No other state has a claim on our fishing.’ He is confident that he and his negotiating team can secure an agreement to leave Iceland outside the common fisheries policy. At the office of the enlargement commissioner, the spokesman Amadeu Altafaj is not so sure. He says of course it is ‘premature’ to say what arrangement the EU might reach with Iceland over the fisheries, but he says firmly that, ‘The EU has a common fisheries policy, and the rules that apply to all fishing must be in line with common policies. There can be no discrimination.’ I doubt the pro-EU government in Reykjavik will translate that into Icelandic, either. Or indeed, that they will translate the articles of the Lisbon Treaty covering fisheries. The treaty says that general fisheries policy is a ‘shared competence.’ That means that when the EU and its member states share a legal power, the member state loses its power to make a decision whenever the EU decides to regulate. And the EU decides to regulate all the time. More, Spain has made it clear it expects its fishing fleet to have access to Icelandic waters if Iceland joins the EU. But Brussels wants to control more than just the Icelandic fisheries. The EU has aspirations to gain influence across the Arctic region. Already, three EU countries, Finland, Sweden and Denmark sit on the Arctic Council, alongside Russia, the United States, Canada and Iceland. But the EU has no seat. The council is growing in importance because of the possibilities of the polar thaw creating new shipping lanes through Canada in a Northwest Passage. There is also the question of mineral resources in the Arctic, and the question of defence installations. Iceland has Keflavik airport, which until the Americans pulled out in 2006, was a key Nato airbase. Indeed, immediately after the financial crash last year, the Russian government stepped in with a loan to the Icelandic government of £3.5bn. Observers reckoned that Russia was trying to get friendly enough to negotiate access to Keflavik. The EU elite would find it intolerable for all this Arctic negotiation to be going on without them. Judging by their past form, if Iceland joined the EU, they would start demanding a seat on the Arctic Council. They would argue that with four EU countries on the council, Brussels should have a voice. The irony is that the voice that will count in all this is not the voice of Brussels, but the voice of a tiny population of 320,000 people on the distant island of Iceland. At the moment, the voice says 'No,' and there is nothing Brussels can do about it. A nation does have the power to say No to Brussels, despite what Mr Cameron says. Maybe that is why so many 'liberals' in other European countries are pretending to be shocked by the result. What really shocks such 'liberals' is that the people of Switzerland intend to decide for themselves how their homeland will deal with the effects of Muslim immigration. Shocking stuff, the power of a referendum. Which is why I found one voice so particularly reasonable in all this. A woman called Elisabeth Salina Amorini, with an address in Crans-Montana, Switzerland has a letter in the Financial Times today. In it she writes: 'Before denouncing the Swiss people as a whole, maybe European governments should ask themselves what would have been the result of a similar vote in their own country if their citizens were able to express themselves in this way.' Okay, David Cameron: I dare you.
03 December 2009 11:41 AM
The pussy cat and the cookies
Now the accusations are flying that Tiger Woods 'manufactured' his good guy image. I doubt it. All the evidence is that he is as decent as most of us have always thought
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What Iceland can teach the Tories
The Tories haven’t realised it yet, but out at the edge of the Arctic Circle, some hundreds of miles north-northwest of Britain, lies a small, tough nation which could teach them everything they need to know about how to deal with the European Union. The nation is Iceland. Its people may yet shame David Cameron and his Tories. They may show them how one nation can say No to Brussels, and to Lisbon, and mean it.
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02 December 2009 4:35 PM
Shocking stuff, democracy
The one thing the Swiss vote on minarets shows for sure is that democracy is alive in Switzerland. The Swiss people have a voice and they know how to use it.
Sunday, 13 December 2009
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