JOSE MANUEL BARROSO EU COMMISSION PRESIDENT..STILL DEPENDENT ON BANKRUPT IDEAS AFTER HE BANKRUPTED EUROPE : OLIVER COOPER
http://www.thecommentator.com/article/484/president_barroso_europe_s_clunking_fist
“Clunk”: The sound rang out across Europe yesterday morning.
“Clunk”: the sound Britons had heard many times before under our esteemed former Prime Minister’s fist.
“Clunk”: the sound that will reside with everyone that witnessed Jose Manuel Barroso’s State of the European Union address.
President Barroso’s fist flew furiously for half an hour, as he feverishly rushed through his cure for what ails Europe. “Clunk”, it went, time and again, smashing down on his parliamentary lectern to punctuate his delivery. His fist clunked with every policy pronouncement.
Clunk. A dramatic expansion of the EU bail-out funds: funds that have hitherto done nothing to patch up the periphery or calm a continent.
Clunk. A renewal and extension of the Social Charter: the regulation-in-chief that strangles European business.
Clunk. A EU-wide tax on financial transactions: aimed squarely at the City of London and neatly punishing countries that haven’t adopted the Euro.
Just like the clunking fist of Brown, Barroso’s speech sounded as though it came from the bunker of an increasingly deluded EU elite. In his first sentence – his first! – he said that Greece will remain a member of the Euro area. Fat chance.
He predicted that his European Transaction Tax would raise €55bn. But this completely ignoring the deterrent effect of higher taxes, and particularly the experience of Sweden, where revenues from a similar tax were over-estimated by a factor of twenty, while destroying Swedish banks.
He said issuing Eurobonds would benefit all members. Although the German Finance Minister has argued that it would irreparably harm the nine Member States – the UK included – that have hitherto maintained their AAA ratings.
He said that ‘only economic and political integration can guarantee peace in our continent’. Yet the experience on the streets of Athens is anything but peaceful.
And most mad, Barroso repeated another old Eurocrat mantra – this is a European problem, and requires European solutions. The European Union failed by design, so why not give more power to an unreformed European Union that’s still designed to fail? Why not, indeed.
Perhaps I’m too harsh. Perhaps there is some economic merit to a centralised, state-planned, Brussels-run continental economy that economists don’t realise.
But this was comprehensively denied by Barroso’s own spokesman on last night’s (spectacular) Newsnight: “There is something more than market logics here at stake. This is a political construction.” People’s jobs will have to wait – there’s politics at stake. Clunk.
Barroso’s speech was dangerous, deluded, and dependent on bankrupt ideas, after his policies bankrupted the continent.
It’s like having Gordon Brown back – nobody wants him, nobody voted for him, and we would be better without him.
Oliver Cooper is a Conservative activist and member of the Progressive Conservatives. He tweets at @OliverCooper
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