In the aftermath of my piece on Cameron, the EU, British insularity usw I received an email from an old friend in the UK.
Who usually agrees with my opinions.
"You've missed the point", he informed me. "It's all down to the fact that the Lisbon Treaty takes away certain rights from the British government, the Tories don't like it, threats to sovereignty usw".
I hadn't missed the point, I just did not mention it. The Lisbon Treaty is a fudge, an attempt to keep everyone happy and achieving the reverse effect. There are bits in it that nobody in any of the 27 EU countries much likes, but as Carl Bildt, the (conservative!) Swedish Minister for Foreign Affairs, pointed out the other day, the fact that you do not like some aspects of summat like the Lisbon Treaty does not mean that you stop talking to other people and simply threaten to leave.
What is perhaps curious is the fact that Tories embrace summat called the "market economy". The market economy works globally, is subject to certain restrictions within the borders of some countries, but overall it passes over the heads of any national politicians.
You want low unemployment? Try stopping companies shutting down operations in your country and moving lock, stock and barrel to China? Cannot do it! It is the "market economy"! No rules control it! It affects all our lives and yet what sovereignty do we have over any of it? Next to none!
Cameron and Tories worry about a few "political" clauses in the Lisbon Treaty but when it comes to the "market economy", they are strong advocates of it - sovereignty or no! The fat cats in the City of London do very well out of it. The common man / woman in the street may be poorer as a result (in fact probably is), job guarantees may not exist any more for people who never earned much anyway, but the sanctity of the "market economy" must never be challenged!
So there are limits - very significant limits - with regard to this "sovereignty" that they are trying to defend anyway! The economic aspects though are vital to the likes of myself, much more so than the "political" aspects that Cameron and his near xenophobic cronies emphasise. The predecessors of the the Lisbon Treaty (from Rome to Maastricht) allowed for the citizens of the countries signed up to move to find jobs within other member states.
This was a great advantage to people in the less prosperous parts of the UK (the places where the Tories win few parliamentary seats) who wanted to work and could find jobs in Holland or Germany for example. Stuck with the prospect of working in Amsterdam or Munich, or trying to live on 44 pounds (at the current rate of exchange app. 51 Euro) a week in an area where, partly as the result of government policies (governments may not be good at creating worthwhile jobs, but if the 1980s in the UK are anything to go by, they are very good at destroying them), the chance of finding anything worthwhile was bleak - which would you choose?
Take the UK out of the EU, exit that possibility. And yes, I know that unemployment is high across the EU at the moment - the partial collapse of the banking system across the continent (worse in some countries than other, Germany got off quite lightly, see Spain in comparison) has left its impact. This, again, is the "market economy", on a global scale, at work. Quite what European banks were doing gambling on the American property market (never mind suffering heavy losses as a result) is a very good question!
If European banks would concentrate on helping to get Europe moving rather than dabbling in shady deals outside its borders .... Perhaps that should have been written into the Lisbon Treaty! And yes, I know Mr Cameron and his chums in the City of London would not have liked that either! Deflation, massive debt piles and high unemployment for the masses, more caviar and champagne and yacht racing for the City bankers!
It was anyway a week of silliness for news coming out of the UK. The day after Mr Cameron's announcement about the referendum came the latest news on negative growth in the UK economy.
One more quarter of negative growth and there will officially be the third recession in four years. The first of these followed the Wall Street Crash Mark II in 2008, the next two have been self-induced by the Tories commitment to deflation at all costs. Go and check some economic history some time, and see what happened in the US in 1938 when FDR decided to listen to the US Treasury and thought tightening the budget was necessary again. The recovering economy went back into a slump!
In other words .....
No explanation necessary. You will vote for this bunch of clowns again at your peril though, referendum or no referendum. The last time they tried it, during the notorious Thatcher years, property speculation (tied to a massive rise in personal debt piles) got them out of it. As the 2008 crash was related to property prices falling to "more realistic" levels, that looks a non-starter, so where else do you go? Particularly as personal debt levels remain ludicrously high!
Anyway having indulged his flights of fancy on the referendum, Mr Cameron also informed the world that he does not like the idea of living in "a country called Europe". Interesting this thing about "countries" as he also cannot understand how many Scots would rather live in a country called "Scotland" rather than in the "United Kingdom".
As for his country called Europe - it is not going to happen, Lisbon Treaty or no Lisbon Treaty!
I have lived in countries called France, Belgium, and the Netherlands, and now live in a country called Germany.
Ask the Dutch some time about their being merged into Germany, and do not expect a polite answer! Old rivalries die hard, and that one is not going to die down any time soon (for all the fact that the Germans feel far less grievous towards the Dutch than vice versa).
Or try the old canard that the UK Eurosceptics love so much about the EU being nothing more than a pact between France and Germany.
The French Social Democrat government recently upped the top tax rate in France to 75% (well you have to cut the deficit somehow, and nobody else has any spare money). In Germany (with its current moderate conservative government) it is 45%, and is never going to rise to 75% whoever wins the next election.
A country called Europe with different tax rates, different health systems (compare France with Romania or Greece), different education systems, different defence planning (the French have a nuclear weapon still, where is the Dutch or Belgian nuclear bomb?), different transportation planning usw .....
There will be areas of common interest - see the Lisbon Treaty for those, but do not overstate the issue. The day that Germany completely takes over the economies of Spain, Portugal, Italy, Greece (and even the UK while I am talking about the struggling economies of Europe) you had better watch out for flying pigs!
That Germany is influencing events in those countries (if it weren't it would be the IMF, my friends - the problems would still exist) goes without saying. We lend you the money, you fix your economies. If they did not need fixing? Fine. But as they do, the main lender has some say - that is how it works. And if Germany had turned round and said "we are not lending you the money - fix it yourself!"???? Some you don't win and the rest you lose ....
In passing, I would not say that the current German government has handled the European debt crisis all that well. Given the fact that I am not even a moderate conservative, though, that opinion should not be all that surprising.
Anyway IMHO it strikes me that Cameron and his cronies are simply using the EU as a bogeyman to blame for everything out there. It is well worth remembering that the EU was only responsible for the 2008 crash in that it was not stringent enough in blocking the reckless gambling by private banks in its midst which helped bring the world economy crashing down.
To stop that it would have needed more regulations at both a national and international level to curb the excesses. And as the EU is forever being criticised for all its regulations and "bloated bureaucracy", applying further regulations and increasing the bureaucracy further would have been an inevitable requirement.
Is that really what Cameron and the British Tories want(ed)? I somehow doubt it!
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