The Euro Titanic is sinking but there's no lifeboat for Britain - http://www.telegraph.co.uk/

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/


The Euro Titanic is sinking but there's no lifeboat for Britain
Talk of 'loosening ties' with the European Union is a delusion.

As the battle for the euro spins out of control, it is clear that this is the biggest crisis the “European project” has ever brought on itself. Its implications for the world economy and for the EU’s own future are incalculable. But as, having hit the euro iceberg, it looks to some as if the Titanic of the European Union itself is beginning to slip slowly beneath the waves, plaintive voices are heard in Britain saying that we must look for a lifeboat. Some 120 “Eurosceptic” Tory MPs, we are told, are calling for a “redrawing of our relationship with Europe”. We must “repatriate powers”. William Hague says “Britain could benefit from loosening its ties with Europe”.
No one expressed this more vividly last week than Max Hastings, in a two-page “recantation”, headed “Sorry, I was wrong”. Having always been a fervent “pro-European”, he proclaimed, he now saw the EU as “a disaster which is blighting every aspect of British life”. The euro folly, crippling regulations, uncontrolled immigration – he chucked everything in to show how the EU has become a monster threatening catastrophe “unless its terms and powers are drastically recast”. And yet (as I recall from the days when I worked for him, and he could scarcely conceal his contempt for my criticisms of the EU), Sir Max has never grasped the real nature of this mighty project or the vision behind it, which is finally colliding with reality.
For 50 years, building itself up step by step into a form of supra-national government, the “European project” has only ever had one aim – to take away ever more powers of member states to govern their own affairs. It has had no more sacred principle than the acquis commmunautaire, which lays down that once powers have been handed to the centre they can never be given back.
No sentence in Hastings’s piece was more poignant than his observation that “in its early decades the Common Market was a benign institution, set up to liberalise trade”. He still cannot grasp that the Common Market was only ever intended as a first step towards the ultimate goal, the embryo of everything the EU has since become, – a vast overblown system of government reaching into almost every area of our lives, and symbolised above all by its hubristic desire for its own single currency.
That is why, as the euro slides towards collapse, the response of President Hermann Van Rompuy –possessed by precisely the same hubris that has built up the EU into all it is today - is to say that the only remedy is that we must have “more Europe”. We must turn the EU into a proper economic government, with the power to impose taxes and to regulate all aspects of economic life, just as it has already done with agriculture, fisheries, immigration law and so much else.
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It is noticeable how Sir Max and all our other born-again Tory “Eurosceptics” do not say “we must leave the EU”. They merely say we must curb its powers, we must reform it; we must “repatriate”, we must “loosen our ties”. In other words, they are calling for things which are never to going to be on offer, because they defy the bedrock principle on which the European project was founded, and which has guided every step of its accretion of power to the centre since the Treaty of Rome was signed in 1957.
This is what generations of Britons, Europhiles and Eurosceptics alike, have never managed to get their heads round. This is why they still babble about the possibility that we can change it, or our relationship with it – because they imagine that the project is something quite different from what it is and was always intended to be.
It is very likely that the EU will eventually disintegrate. But if and when that happens, I wouldn’t mind betting that the last people still in there will be the British, still bleating about the need to reform it, as the pillars of the whole mad edifice crash around their ears.
Wind scam: now we pay for no power
Not only do we give £1 billion a year in subsidies to the owners of Britain’s 3,500 wind turbines in return for pitiful amounts of electricity, but now we must also pay them, through our bills, to produce no electricity at all. During last weekend’s gales, 13 wind farms were told to switch their turbines off because they were chucking out more power than the grid could safely handle. For this they will receive “constraint” payments potentially worth millions of pounds. In May this year, energy companies paid £2.6 million to shut down Scottish wind farms for the same reason.
So, in the windless days of last winter’s freeze, the turbines contributed almost no power at a time of peak demand; and when the wind does blow, we pay them to contribute nothing. Sir Reginald Sheffield, the Prime Minister’s father-in-law, who earns nearly £1,000 a day from the windfarm on his Lincolnshire estate, is certainly in the right business.

Angelique,

even if Parliament agreed to a Referendum and the Country voted to leave the EU, we can"t because we have signed various Treaties and the cost
would be astronomical......Teflon Tony must have known this when he made a Referendum promise in his campaign .

The only way this would happen is if there was a voluntary break-up of the EU, which could well happen because the more solvent Countries would not want to tie themselves to a Eurobond where they are liable for any Members fiscal irresponsibility.