The Chancellor came out beaming, claiming that in allowing new EU-level financial supervision, 'We have a deal which is good for Britain.' As Bugs Bunny once put it, 'What a maroon.' I won't invite you to follow me into the thicket of changes, but as Michel Barnier, the Frenchman who is the commissioner in charge of the internal market and services, said this morning, what they are doing here is building an entire financial services and regulation 'architecture' and now the EU institutions will fill it in 'brick by brick.' Otherwise known as power creep. What's made it somehow worse is that the meetings over these two days have been chaired, first, by Herman Van Rompuy, the Belgian who is now the president of the European Council, and by Didier Reynders, the Finance Minister of Belgium, the country which holds the six-month rotating presidency of the Council of the European Union. (Note the subtle difference in the names of the council. I blame Van Rompuy. Seems he's been bigging up his council into the 'real' European Council, while the other seems to have been demoted to being a kind of umbrella group for organising ministers' meetings. Not that it's got a smaller staff now. Certainly not. Staff numbers, like spending budgets, only ever go up in Brussels.) The point is that these two key chairmen come from Belgium, which is as near as you can get to being a non-country. So just who are they supposed to be representing? And why should we think that, having made a hash of their own country, they ought to be turned loose on the other 26 in the EU? How bad is it now in Belgium? The place had its general election in June and its politicians still haven't been able to put together a government. At the weekend, the French-speaking socialist, Elio Di Rupo, resigned from his role as head of negotiations. Now the king, who knows he will be minus one country and therefore out of a throne if Belgium breaks up, has called for a Dutch-speaking politician and another French-speaking politician to have a go at the talks. It is pretty unlikely they will have any success. The two halves of the country, the French-speaking Walloons and the Dutch-speaking Flemings, just don't have enough common ground for agreement. Many of the Flemings, who form a majority of the population of Belgium, want out. As the leader of the largest party in the country, Bart De Wever, a Flemish separatist put it earlier this year, he would like Belgium to 'evaporate.' Last Sunday the Fleming separatists engaged in an annual demonstration of riding bikes around the boundary of Brussels to remind the people of the city that they are surrounded by Flanders. Yet Brussels, thanks to generations of manipulation by those trying to wash away the Dutch culture of the city, is now a majority French-speaking city. Apparently during the negotiations the politicians asked if a corridor linking Brussels south to French speaking Wallonia could be established. Great. A sort of Berlin airlift corridor to Keep Brussels French. The kind of minds who think that's the way to run a country are now chairing committees with the power to decide the fate of Britain's financial services industry. And the Chancellor thinks this is a deal which is good for Britain. This isn't supposed to happen. Indeed, the Commission has an annual euro-propaganda budget of at least £2.3bn to make sure it doesn't happen. But somehow it has. The more the people of Europe have of 'more Europe,' the less they like it. Not that the Brussels elite whose lush careers depend on 'more Europe' will accept that people increasingly dislike the EU because they know more and more about it. No, the minute the poll was published, the commission was twisting the results with a press handout headlined: 'EU citizens favour stronger European economic governance.' It claimed that 92 percent of people think the EU has set the right priorities for economic recovery. Whaaa? 92 percent? The last time I saw a figure of that sort support was in one of the Soviet elections. Yes, Leonid Brezhnev was 92 percent loved, and the figures proved it. Viviane Reding, the Luxembourger commissioner in charge of the propaganda department known as 'communications,' even insisted: 'The clear majority for enhanced European economic governance shows that people see the EU as a decisive part of the solution to the crisis.' She wants us to believe that 75 percent of the people in EU countries are in favour of giving the EU -- ie, people like her -- a stronger role in the coordination of member states' economic and budgetary policies. Mats Persson, the head of the Open Europe think tank, took that kind of absurd commission spinning apart in an article for the Swedish news site Europaportalen. Mats has paraphrased the piece for me in English. He wrote that such overwhelming support for EU interference just doesn't appear anywhere else in the poll. What else doesn't appear anywhere in the poll is the role of the EU or the term 'European economic governance.' All there is is a woolly question about whether or not you think it would be effective to combat the current crisis with 'a stronger coordination of economic and financial policies among all the EU Member States.' The propaganda merchants at the commission couldn't resist massaging the result, adding up two groups of different answers into an omnibus 75 percent figure, then repackaging it as three-quarters of all the people of the EU member states being in favour of giving the EU more powers to monitor national economies. But that was never the question. Mats took apart other commission 'interpretations' of the figures, and then noted, ''The commission's Eurobarometer is very expensive -- almost 27,000 people were interviewed face-to-face -- begging the question whether taxpayers' money really should be used in this way.' José Manuel Barroso, the president of the commission, tried to spin the poll, too. Almost as soon as it was out, he was onto the Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera to insist that the fault for the falling support rests with the governments of member states. He said that when things go wrong, the governments blame it on the EU, but they take all the credit for the things Brussels accomplishes: 'I problemi non si risolveranno fino a che ogni nazione non vede il progetto europeo come il suo progetto.' My recent year in Rome tells me what Barroso meant is that the problems will not be resolved until each nation sees the European project as its own project. In other words, according the Barroso, what is causing the unpopularity of the EU among the people of the 27 EU countries is that the governments of Britain, Sweden, the Netherlands and the rest just pig-headedly insist on looking after their own nations first instead of looking after the interests of the EU first. He spins the poll until its results are meaningless . So much for the value of the Eurobarometer poll. Once the results get through the mincer at the commission, they bear no resemblance to how the answers went in. Yet the commission will go on ordering Eurobarometer to go on running polls. Eurobarometer is the commission's own creature, after all. And no matter what the results say about people wanting to get the EU out of their lives, the eurocrats will go on insisting the problem is 'communication.' They will insist, as they always do, that if 'EU citizens' (may the phrase burn in hell) only knew more about all the wonderful work the EU is doing for them, they would learn to love the EU just as much as the eurocrats themselves do. At which point the reasoning of boss eurocrat Barroso and the other eurocrats turns into the reasoning of the stalker, insisting that if only the young woman would get to know him, she would realise how much he loves her, and how much she really -- though she resists it -- loves him. He knows he's the only man for her. It is only others -- the eurosceptic press, the governments of member states -- who are poisoning her mind against him. And he'll stand outside her house at midnight every night and follow her to work everyday until she admits the truth. Then surely she will she will submit to an ever closer union...k Just a follow-up to my blog of August 23rd on the attempts to build a mosque two blocks from Ground Zero: Human Events, the long-established Capitol Hill journal, has published reports that reveal Feisal Abdul Rauf, the man who plans to be the Imam at the multi-million dollar mosque, 'owns taxpayer-subsidised apartment buildings in Hudson County [the part of New Jersey across the Hudson River from Manhattan] where the tenants have made municipal health complaints including rat, roach and bedbug infestations, seeping toilets, leaks, urine soaked hallways, no heat and no hot water.' Connie Hair, Congressional correspondent for Human Events, also notes a recent report from the New York Post, which said: 'The mosque developers are tax deadbeats. Sharif El-Gamal,the leading organiser behind the mosque and community centre near Ground Zero, owes $224,270.77 in back property tax on the site, city records show. El-Gamal's company, 45 Park Place Partners, failed to pay its half-yearly bills in January and July, according to the city Finance Department.' 'Sounds like a good time to raise $100m for a mosque.'
07 September 2010 3:31 PM
Belgians help pedal rings around Osborne
02 September 2010 4:52 PM
That man outside your house every midnight: Barroso the stalker
Ground Zero mosque imam 'a taxpayer-subsidised slumlord' looking for $100m
Sunday, 12 September 2010
It's bad enough being corralled here in the press room of the European Council without knowing that upstairs the Chancellor George Osborne has been handing over the keys to the City of London to a bunch of Continentals and eurocrats with not a financial services industry between them.
You might not have noticed but heaven knows it is the sort of thing they notice at the Commission: a few days ago a Eurobarometer poll was published which showed that support for the EU is falling all across the Continent. Fewer than half of the citizens of European Union member states now think that belonging to the EU is a good thing for their country.
'Despite millions of dollars in government subsidies, Rauf has trouble maintaining several small apartment buildings in North Bergen,
Palisades Park and Union City.'
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