Monday, 16th March 2009
Europe in Crisis
As we move towards the European elections on 4th June, Scotland and the rest of the UK has fallen into a deep recession. Gordon Brown first tried to blame the world for our economic woes and then to say his policies had saved the world! He is like the doomed U-Boat captain in an old war movie, frantically ordering his crew to pull every lever, as the wrecked craft plunges to the seabed while he shrieks plaintively 'No more boom and bust' – 'British jobs for British workers', 'quantitative easing'. His opportunism has only been outdone by his ineptitude and incompetence.
Gordon Brown became Chancellor in 1997 when Tony Blair swept to power. He held that post until Blair retired in June 2007, then becoming Prime Minister himself, the job he had much coveted and conspired to achieve. So there is no hiding place for Brown. He inherited the strongest economy in Europe when he took office in 1997 and in 12 short years he has wrecked it. We are now the weakest economy in Europe. No other EU Member State, not even Ireland, not even the so-called economic PIGS - Portugal, Italy, Greece and Spain, can match our spiral of decline. His vacuous attempts to steady the ship by reducing VAT by 2.5%, at a time when high street shops are commonly offering discounts of 50%, have even been ridiculed by Nicolas Sarkozy. His nationalisation of the banks and attempts to throw money at the problem has meant that every man, woman and child in Britain now faces a bill from the taxman of £33,000. Every baby that is born will start life with that enormous debt. Just paying interest on that debt will cost every child over £130,000 in taxes over their lifetime. For the average worker that is the equivalent of having to work nine extra years just to pay off Labour's debt! It is scandalous!
And yet Gordon Brown presided over eleven years of boom. Where did all the money go? What do we have to show for it? An education system that is not fit for purpose and sends countless children into the world barely able to read, write or add up; a health system plagued with endemic infection; a police force wading through a tide of bureaucracy and red tape against a background of mounting violence and knife crime; a transport infrastructure that is the laughing stock of Europe; a fractured energy policy that has only 11 days gas storage capacity compared to over 100 days in France and Germany; What a legacy! What a shambles! Labour has once again bankrupted Britain. They spent too much and borrowed too much even before the recession began.
Having sown the wind we are now reaping the whirlwind, a storm of repossessions, closures, bankruptcies, job losses and redundancies. And worst of all, Labour's debts mean that Britain will spend more on paying interest than on educating our children. We will spend more on paying the interest on Labour's debts than on our entire transport system. We will spend more on paying the interest on Labour's debts than on police and prisons combined. We will spend more on paying the interest on Labour's debts than on building new homes.
Gordon Brown - the so-called Iron Chancellor - ignored the warnings, failed to put in place the necessary regulatory systems and entered the credit crunch with the biggest budget deficit of any major economy; worse than 104 other countries; worse than Bolivia, Serbia, Chad, Guatemala or even Uganda. And these record debt levels will simply delay recovery of the British economy and undermine people's confidence in the future. This has led to the historic collapse in the value of the pound. The UK has been hit harder than any other country by the banking crisis. We’ve been forced to make the world’s biggest down-payments to rescue our banks. According to the IMF, the up-front public cost of saving the UK’s finance giants has amounted to almost one fifth of national output, or almost £280 bn. This is light years ahead of the US where their rescue package comes in at around 6.3% of GDP. Only Norway, at 13.8% comes close!
Well, we have a chance on 4th June to show Labour what we think of their bankrupt policies. If we mobilise our Conservative votes we can win two of Scotland's six Euro seats and elect Belinda Don to serve alongside me in the European Parliament. What a victory that would be. For the Conservatives to knock Labour into third place in a national poll would be a resounding triumph and would act as a massive springboard for our candidates in the Westminster elections. This must be our target. But it means hard work. It means making sure that every Conservative pledge comes out to vote. And for those who say that Europe is unimportant remind them of this.....more than 70% of all the legislation that affects our everyday lives emanates from the EU. We have seen more and more of our sovereign authority drained away from Holyrood and Westminster to Brussels and if the Lisbon Treaty (or EU Constitution) is approved, we will cede even more of our dwindling power to the centre.
We had the President of the Czech Republic – Václav Klaus, currently holding the rotating six month presidency of the EU, speaking to us in Brussels recently. His speech was brilliantly provocative and needless to say, led to jeers and catcalls and mass walkout by the Socialists and their Liberal fellow-travellers. Listen to what he had to say:
“For us in the Czech Republic there was and there is no alternative to EU membership. But the EU should stand for two things: removing unnecessary barriers to free movement of people, goods, services, ideas, political philosophies, world views, cultural patterns and behaviour models. The other task for the EU is to carry out projects at a continental level that cannot best be done by two neighbouring countries reaching agreement together.
But instead of applying itself to these two fundamental tasks, the EU has instead created barriers, created red tape, created bureaucracy. Is everything you vote for necessary? He asked the assembled MEPs to catcalls and jeers from the left!
Ignoring the roars of disapproval he went on “There is a well-postulated and therefore uncriticisable dogma that there is only one possible and correct future for EU integration…ever closer union. The enforcement of these notions by those who consider themselves to be the owners of the keys to EU integration is unacceptable. Not so long ago, in our part of Europe, we lived in a political system that permitted no alternatives. We discovered the truth is that without political opposition you have no freedom."
I think President Klaus makes a valid point. The proposed EU Constitution was rejected emphatically in referendums in France and the Netherlands – then promptly re-packaged as The Lisbon Treaty and rejected again…this time in Ireland. But there is a determination that Lisbon will be shoved through by hook or by crook. The Euro elite never allowed democracy to stand in way of their lofty ambitions to create a United States of Europe. The Irish will be forced to vote again, probably in October and meanwhile every bribe and inducement has been put on the Irish table to ensure that this time they get the answer right.
Europe lives, in the words of Czech President Vaclav Klaus, in a world of 'post-democracy'! And post-democracy is not democracy. Provocatively he says that countries like the Czech Republic see EU integration as a relentless drive towards remote rule by a centralised bureaucracy and having survived the dictatorships of both Hitler and Stalin, he is not keen to repeat the experience. Of course no-one in their right mind would ever compare the brutal persecution and oppression of Hitler or the Soviets with the squidgy, soft, spongy tyranny of the Euro-elite, but the end product is broadly the same. EU politics is just an extension of war by other means. To be sure, it's all much gentler and more polite now than it was then. The disputes that once were resolved with tanks and dive bombers are now sorted out in endless, boring meetings in Brussels and Strasbourg, where no-one realises they have been stuffed until months later!
The losers in this new, silent war are allowed some face-saving devices to help retain their dignity. They can keep their flags, provided they fly a Euro one as well. They can keep their small, symbolic armies and even, in some cases, their currencies, but their governments have all the real power of a British county council.
Is it only a coincidence that many of the foreign policy aims and objectives which Germany has pursued for 100 years have come to pass under the EU flag? France is now Germany's obedient poodle. The Balkans and Eastern Europe have been brought under direct EU control. Russia's western boundaries have been rolled back hundreds of miles. The small nations of Eastern Europe provide cheap labour for German companies and their farmers send cheap vegetables to German supermarkets. Ancient border disputes in continental Europe have been wiped out by simply abolishing the borders themselves in the astonishing Schengen Agreement. Britain, meanwhile, sits in hostile but powerless inaction on the periphery. The Euro elite hope that a Europe without internal borders will finally bury the idea of a Europe of Nations and we will one day wake up in a new, bureaucratic European Empire.
And Germany's domination of the European Parliament will continue after the Euro elections in June. While France and Britain will have their MEPs cut from 78 to 72 each, Germany will retain 99 MEPs, thanks to a dodgy deal struck between Schroeder and Chirac at the Nice Summit in December 2000.
So we face German domination inside the EU; we are dependent on Russia for our energy supplies; we seek to appease Iran and the mullahs to avoid threats of terrorism and meanwhile we do everything in our power to undermine and distance ourselves from our trans-Atlantic allies in the US.
Meanwhile, an emergency summit meeting had to be held in Brussels the weekend before last, ostensibly to combat protectionism. Really, the EU leaders were there to talk about the deepening financial crisis that has beset Eastern Europe and in particular the economic meltdown in the new accession states. Robert Zoellick, president of the World Bank, has even suggested that Europe might once again split in two, prompting the Hungarian Prime Minister to talk about the emergence of a new “iron curtain” descending across Europe. But Europe’s leaders cannot stand idly by and watch the disintegration of their cherished project. Old Europe needs to help New Europe. But Old Europe is hurting too and its beleaguered taxpayers have enough on their plates to bail out their own stricken economies without worrying about Hungary, Bulgaria and the Baltic States.
The problem is a serious one. If Europe cannot solve its difficulties, the Eurozone could split. Many of the new accession states celebrated their post-Soviet freedom by rushing headlong into the free trade of goods and services and loading up on debt-fuelled expansion, which is now estimated to stand at around £300 billion. This is the extent of help these new Member States are pleading for, although their pleas were dismissed out of hand at the Brussels summit.
Certainly all thought of further enlargement has been put on hold. Long-standing promises made way back in 2003 to consider Albania, Bosnia and Serbia for EU entry look set to be broken. Montenegro’s application for the first stages of membership assessment was blocked by Germany and the Netherlands only two weeks ago. Turkish membership has stalled. Next month, Germany, Austria and Belgium are expected to extend restrictions on the free movement of workers from central and eastern European countries, a full five years after those countries joined the EU. So the core tenets of the Treaty of Rome, the free movement of goods, services, people and capital, are now under threat. At a time when Europe needs to defend the openness of its markets and to declare war on protectionism, we seem to be doing exactly the opposite.
The answer, I am certain, lies with China. China is the only economy bucking the current global trend. Although they are also suffering a severe downturn and have seen job losses on a scale that we can barely contemplate in the West, they are nevertheless sustaining economic growth at around 8%. The Chinese are also wily investors. They know that this is the ideal time to snap up international companies cheap. They’ve already bought a swathe of major mining and energy companies. Last week they appointed Rothschild to advise on the acquisition of troubled car giant Volvo in Sweden. Also last week a high-level Chinese business delegation travelled to Europe to explore investment avenues - close on the heels of a trade team which returned to Beijing the week before.
Officials in the Ministry of Commerce in Beijing said the team was visiting Switzerland, Germany, the United Kingdom and Spain, mainly looking for investment in merger and acquisition opportunities in this the first mission of its kind to western Europe. Their targets were companies competitive in manufacturing, clean energy and environmental protection.
This mission, I am sure, will be the first of many.
