Happy New Year
Tuesday 1 January 2013
To celebrate "the entry of the United Kingdom into the European Community" on 1 January 1973, the lawyer Lord Goodman, a former chairman of the Arts Council, was invited by his friend Mr Heath to organise a series of nation-wide events under the title "Fanfare for Europe".
At a gala evening at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, prosperous bankers were regaled with operatic hits and guffawed at snippets about foreigners read by actors, while a special arrangement of Beethoven's "Ode to Joy" modulated into a piece of pseudo-jazz by Michael Tippet. In a darkened room, the Victoria and Albert Museum put on show a tastefully lit selection of art-objects from each member state, such as a pair of Bronze Age wind instruments from a Danish bog. A concert was given in York Minster by the Great Universal Stores Footwear band. The Whitechapel Art Gallery staged an exhibition of sweet-wrappers. Gas and electricity showrooms across the country featured demonstrations of continental cookery. For many, however, their first experience of "belonging" to the Common Market came with the arrival of VAT, possibly the most bureaucratic tax system ever devised. Introduced by the EEC in 1967, its advantage to the state was that for the first time millions of businesses would have to act as unpaid tax collectors, charging their customers 10 percent on the cost of all goods and services supplied, then subtracting all the VAT paid to their own suppliers on items not "zero-rated" or exempt, and sending the difference to the government. As a reflection of the new system of government the British people were now about to live under, it was a foretaste of much that was to come. This is what Booker and I wrote in The Great Deception, of that momentous event. And exactly forty years after we joined, we still have not come to terms with membership, and never will. With a bit of luck (and a lot of hard work), we will never see 50 years of membership. For the first time since we joined, our withdrawal looks to be a realistic prospect. And that, if nothing else, makes it a Happy New Year. But the year we actually leave will be even happier. COMMENT THREAD Richard North 01/01/2013 |
EU politics: CBI scrapes the bottom of the barrel
Monday 31 December 2012
You can be assured that, whenever the European Union debate reaches any level of prominence, up will pop the Confederation of British Industry on the wrong side of the argument, spraying out scare stories with gay abandon.
Right on cue, therefore, out of the woodwork comes CBI director-general, John Cridland, full of the wobblies about how the UK must stay in "Europe" to "boost business success". What is so predictable and dire about the man is the leaden language and the total absence of imagination. The corporate bureaucrat thus tells us in his New Year address that "the UK has ensured its values of free and open trade have been at the heart of Europe over the last 40 years". One gets so tired and bored with the CBI's delusional drivel, scraping the bottom of the barrel of the europhile arguments. The EU (and the EEC before it) has never embraced free trade within the territorial boundaries of its member states, the grouping comprising a customs union, which is a very different thing. It is designed not to pursue economic prosperity but to drive political union. This has always made the CBI a very suspicious organisation. Dominated by big business, and then by multinational corporations, it has a greater affinity to the corporate, centralist world of the EU than it does free enterprise – and even freedom itself. Thus, its propaganda has been devoted to selling the prospect that the EU is "good for business", when what it actually means is that its corporate interests are best served by a supranational government in Brussels, rather than it having to deal with a messy grouping of national governments. So does Cridland dress up his organisation's interests by telling us that the UK has been helping to create "one of the biggest successes of the European Union – the Single Market". Yet, so great is this "success" that since the turn of the Century alone – a mere twelve years – we have accumulated a trade deficit with the rest of the EU of over £300 billion, with the total trade deficit since we joined the EEC in 1973 running to over £450 billion. But, according to Cridland, "It' s essential we stay at the table to bang the drum for businesses and defend our national interest, particularly protecting our world-class financial services industry to maintain our competitiveness internationally". It is, of course, the ultimate arrogance of the CBI to equate its own corporate interests with those of the national interest, shaping the agenda on Single Market reform; on climate change; protecting the financial services industry; and promoting new trade agreements. That we could do all this and more outside the EU (if we wanted to), is obviously of no relevance to the CBI. This dire organisation has become (and has been for a long time) a propaganda arm of the European Union (and the EEC before that), pursuing the interests of the "colleagues". It has long forgotten what the "B" in CBI stands for and is best treated as the enemy – as should anyone who projects their narrow sectional interests as representing the national interest. COMMENT THREAD Richard North 31/12/2012 |
Media: no longer a serious player
Monday 31 December 2012
 Certainly, any newspaper which makes such a fundamental blunder cannot be taken as a serious player on matters to do with the EU. But then, for a media at large which insists on calling the European Councils "summits", it is unsurprising that such mistakes are made. The waning credibility of the legacy media also helps explain why circulation is in terminal decline. The last figures for the Failygraph (October), bottomed out at 560,471 copies daily, a 7.19 percent drop year-on-year. In July, the average was 576,790 copies. This is a newspaper which, in 1980 boasted a circulation of 1.4 million and even in the year 2000 managed over a million copies daily. Still, though, with the size of the business halved – and currently in free fall – it has not come to terms with the reasons for its decline. To an extent, that decline is shrouded by the "bubble effect", as the media and politicians still talk to each other in a closed loop, giving the hacks the impression that they are just as influential as they have ever been. But, where the stock of politicians is also on the wane, the politico-media bubble ends up talking to itself while the rest of the world looks on. Certainly, as Witterings from Witney points out, we are not going to get any sense from the legacy media on the EU issue. They have not even begun to master the basics, which means that we get nothing of any value from them.
But as long as the media are so far distant from reality that they can make their elementary mistakes, yet have the likes of Leveson commend them for the "powerful reputation for accuracy", there is no obvious corrective. Unaware of their own mistakes, the media will continue to make them, increasingly conforming their own irrelevance in a debate where their readers are better informed.
How ironic it is then that the Failygraph presumes to tell Mr Cameron what to do, when it can't even put its own house in order. COMMENT THREAD Richard North 31/12/2012 |
EU politics – a tremendous year?
Monday 31 December 2012
 This is the Union of European Federalists, which is to suggest that the UK should become an "associate member" under plans "which would result in it staying in the EU's single market but being stripped of its commissioner in Brussels, MEPs, and its right of veto in the European Council". Notwithstanding that there is no veto in the European Council, effectively, this gets close to our own position, where Britain leaves the EU but retains membership of the EEA, thus representing a merging of positions where both sides come to the same conclusions as to where the future should lie (for the time being). For the Federalists, however, disappointment awaits, as there is no mechanism in the treaties to eject an EU member, so Britain would have to agree to a voluntary exit, via Article 50. But if the Federalists want this to happen, then the negotiations should be very straightforward. Any such formula would certainly remove any problems about withdrawal being a "disaster for the City", fears of which are being spread by anonymous sources, by the Telegraph. It is interesting here that the sources are anonymous, which must limit their credibility, in an industry which, historically, demonstrates a poor understanding of the ways of the EU. All of this, and more, though, is quite clearly intended to influence Mr Cameron's forthcoming speech, hence the rhetoric from The Observer telling us that "Britain should not be contemplating isolation from Europe". No-one, though (at least, not us) is considering "isolation". EEA membership would ensure full engagement with the EU, while allowing us to be active members of the international community in our own right. But all this may have less impact on Cameron than the recent poll results, indicating that UKIP is "surging" in popularity. Even if this does not translate into seats, the "UKIP effect" could well be strengthened, which puts the party in the position where it can make certain a Conservative defeat at the general election, in circumstances where many pundits already believe the Tories will lose the 2015 election. This makes for a fascinating situation for, if Mr Cameron shares a conviction that his party is going to be defeated at the general, he has nothing to lose by breaking the mould and going all-out for EU withdrawal – on grounds that both sides could approve. It must now be dawning on Cameron that he has to accommodate anti-EU sentiment, and if the current poll is right – giving UKIP 15 percent – then burying the EU issue by going straight for the Article 50 option, while offering a referendum on the outcome of negotiations, could give him a lead in the polls. Possibly, never has so much rested on a single speech, the one that we expect in a few short weeks. And if Farage believes 2012 has been a "tremendous year", Cameron still has the opportunity to make UKIP history. If he does it right, everybody should be happy when the Conservatives also have a tremendous year. COMMENT THREAD Richard North 31/12/2012 |
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