Does anyone else find it outrageous that the UK and Netherlands are planning on subordinating their national laws to the EU in the face of wide public opposition without allowing the public to vote on the matter?
David Miliband today warned against “institutional navel-gazing” in Europe as he made clear the government would refuse to bow to calls for a referendum on the EU draft treaty.
The foreign secretary used a keynote address to the Labour conference to tell delegates that Europe would not divide his party as it had divided the Tories.
Calls for a referendum have come from the trade unions, the Conservatives, the rightwing press – including a full-scale onsalught this week from the Sun – and a cross-party alliance including several Labour backbenchers.
Despite mounting pressure, Mr Miliband held the government line that the EU draft treaty would go to parliament, rather than be put to a vote of the general public.
The foreign secretary said Europe should focus its sights on the problems beyond European borders “that define insecurity within” rather than worrying about its internal workings.
He said: “It doesn’t need institutional navel-gazing, and that is why the reform treaty abandons fundamental constitutional reforms and offers clear protections for national sovereignty,” he said.
“It should be studied and passed by parliament.”
I can’t understand why the residents of the UK are tolerating this. I’d love to hear from people with more political and cultural knowledge than I have on it.
AL
You’re a bit late; our laws have been subordinate to “Europe” since 1973. What has changed in the meantime is that the “competencies” of the EU have remorelessly expanded since then, and despite votes to the contrary, continue to do so. It is estimated that 75% of all UK laws are now made by the EU.
There’s only one way out of this, and that is to leave
R
I think it was in the comedy _Yes, minister_ where it was said that the UK was in the EU to make it stop working from inside. Sadly, they were wrong.
Sure, I find it outrageous, AL, as many other things that happen in Europe. I began feeling in such way when mortar shells rained on the Sarajevo market, in the 1990’s, and no European nation moved a finger to stop it. This is the way we are.
I think the Eurocrats should openly constitute themselves as an aristocracy and make clear that they don’t mind about our opinions.
…or our lifes.
J. Aguilar:
How are they not making that clear?
If Europe had a future, I would say that this sort of anti-democratic centralism was doomed to fail, as the impulses of liberty and enterprise must always break such chains sooner or later.
But if you pride yourself in being a senile and impotent culture, this is just the thing.
We are putting up with it because we have no choice. The three main parties all agree that we are going to stay as a part of the EU, and the one that happens to be in power actually wants the EU to expand its power in the UK, because it stands for the sort of bureaucratic statism that socialists just love.
In addition to this, as it probably is in America, it is more a question of voting in the least offensive bunch of corrupt morons than actually voting for a party that you like the policies of, because most people in UK support better policing, harsher punishments, less immigration and less bureaucrats and none of the main parties advocate any of those.
Labour in particular has been frantically recruiting government employees, because that way they create a constituency that would be diagnosable as insane if they voted anything but Labour, as they depend on Government for their income and have no marketable skills.
Guy Fawkes had a point.
Glen (#4)
I pride myself about nothing, I simply point out observed facts.
The Eurocrats take the European parliament as an excuse to argue that theirs is a democratic institution. I don’t like such hypocrisy. I would like that they acknowledged they have nothing of democratic, that theirs is an institution ruled from inside by the French establishment with German help and ocassional cheque issuing toward the UK, Italy and Spain, when needed.
I don’t think either that our culture is senile or impotent, it is simply Socialist, and now that Socialism is over, they have to invent something new to continue ruling the Europeans without their opinions, and that is the EU government. It is an adaptation of Socialism, and uses the same tactics of granting privileges and issuing cheques, but now among nations.
The shift from the proposed changes being a constitution to a treaty revising earlier treaties to make a fundamentally unchanged system work in an expanded EU of 25+ countries. It is arguable whether the change is real or merely a cosmetic makeover to sneak the rejected constitution in by the back door. However, when the govt. say it is a revision not a refoundation, a lot of people are inclined to give them the benefit of the doubt.
Especially as people find it hard to believe that national politicians are in fact renouncing power as the critics insist.
The euro-sceptic elements within the Conservative Party have tended to cause many others outside that party (including some former Conservative voters) to write off the issue as an intra-Tory squabble, not to say obsession.
High levels of residual unpopularity of the Tories outside their core vote has had a toxic effect; a lot of people still have a reflex of “If the Tories are against it, I’m for it.” And though Fletcher Christian argues correctly that all three major parties are in favour of continued EU membership, nonetheless the anti-EU stance is identified as Tory.
The inability of the euro-sceptic camp to develop a coherent position on how a rejection of the treaty/constitution would be followed up. Status quo? Withdrawal? Renegotiation of the treaty/constitution? On what terms? Basic renegotiation of the UK position with regard to EU? UK negotiating individually with an EU bloc or are mutual renegotiation among all 25? Is EU lack of democratic control at executive (Commission) level a bad thing or good (insofar as it means lack of distinct legitimacy and continued subordination to the Council of Ministers)?
This combines with a widespread recognition that while the EU may be aggravating in its pettifogging interferences, and dubious in its political philosophy and methodology, nonetheless it has benefits for the UK as a stabilising force in European inter-state relations, and a free trade are with Europe is today a crucial part of the British economy.
Euro-sceptics suggest that a purely free-trade agreement would be attainable; others doubt that outside the EU institutions this would automatically be available, or guaranteed not to be skewed against us in the longer term.
Also, a thoroughgoing single market system entails myriad points that need supranational political agreement, be it as basic as “how many spokes on the plug”.
Some euro-sceptics have shown a talent for pronouncements that lead many to view the whole bunch as a load of swivel-eyed loons on vacation from another planet.
For instance from From Tom Hamilton’s blog LetsBeSensible (blogspot):
_”She gave me a badly-written 16-page “newspaper” in which I found the following:
On the 22nd June 1940 Hermann Goering, Hitler’s minister, founded
the European Union (the EEC). If it is the Beast of Revelation as it boasts, Jesus will eventually destroy the EU in person. If we fill our 37,501 churches and pray nationally for deliverance, we will be delivered from the EU.”_
People have a ‘boy who cried wolf’ reaction. Euro-sceptics have used extremes of rhetoric for so long that their credibility with many outside their camp has been damaged
J. Aguilar #2:
Re. European inaction in Sarajevo; at least some British politicians and commentators against action at the time and since were Conservatives and rather euro-sceptic as well.
They simply believed that war in Yugoslavia between Bosniaks and Serbs was nothing to do with Britain or British interests, and that previous EU statements on the matter were a folly due largely a German policy on Yugoslavia combining bumptiousness, self-righteousness, incompetence and incapacity.
Very interesting, John Farren (#7).
I agree that the extreme positions against the European Union in the UK interfere with any attempt to build a rational stance there against the European Constitution, now mutated in some short of treaty. I would like to know who are really behind such pronouncements.
Of course, no European country, but Norway and Switzerland, can survive without having access to the common market, that is a fact. What is here at stake is not that pan-European market, but whether we let the Eurocrats to make decissions that affect at least 450 million people, without any democractic accountability.
BTW,
_On the 22nd June 1940 Hermann Goering, Hitler’s minister, founded
the European Union (the EEC). If it is the Beast of Revelation as it boasts, Jesus will eventually destroy the EU in person. If we fill our 37,501 churches and pray nationally for deliverance, we will be delivered from the EU._
This exaggeration has some truth. Of course, the Nazis did not found the common market, on the contrary, they triggered a war to get theirs; but it is true that Socialist policies in Europe have been deeply influenced by the German Nationalsocialism, and that today’s “Franco-German friendship” is rooted in the Vichy regime, for which former French president, during the 1980’s and early 1990’s, Mitterrand worked.
With respect to the former Yugoslavia, I dream in an Europe where just the threatening of massacring civilians would be a reason to issue an appropiate response that avoided such danger. That is enough for me, for declaring or even going to a war. I also reach the conclusion that if European nations did not want to defend the fundamental right of Life, not even at two hundred kilometers from Trieste, how can we think they would defend Freedom, or any other right, together? The European Union is not an Union, it is a club were interests are negotiated hiden to the public opinion, being the Eurocrats a part in the negotiation and the European Parliament an extremely expensive alibi.
I interpret the lack of concern for Life, even for a Bosniak Muslim one, I don’t mind at all; as a sign of the position that We The People occupy in the average European politician mind.