This EU Won't Work

A précis of previous posts on this theme

In 2015 The European Commission published a report by five EU presidents of its key groups, led by Jean-Claude Juncker as President of the Commission. We reviewed this document, which fairly clearly laid out where they intended to take economic and monetary union (EMU), in three posts.

The introduction opens with this: “closer coordination of economic policies is essential to ensure the smooth functioning of the Economic and Monetary Union”. And, it goes without saying, EMU is essential to ensure ever closer union, so the argument is circular.

Another guide to the thinking of the five presidents is their view that, “… completing and fully exploiting the Single Market … should be part of a stronger boost towards economic union…”. This surely is the wrong way round: The purpose of any economic union should be to support the economic activities of the member states and their citizens but we know from our reading that political union (the ideology) takes precedence; everything else is PR to cover the main goal. The Single Market may have simplified intra-EU trade but has extended its regulatory reach far into national markets where international standards don’t matter but tradition may. It has heaped burdensome complexity and administration onto purely local businesses, which represent 80% of the UK’s own market, so does not enhance economic efficiency; they should only be troubled if they seek to export but that would not satisfy the Union’s true purpose. EMU meanwhile has been an economic disaster that will only meet the real purpose if it doesn’t destroy it, which seems more likely.

The first post provided a link to the report and a critique of its Introduction. The second post looked in some detail at the five main sections of the report, finding much to criticise in the form of: propaganda, specious claims, contradictions and the true agenda. In the third post we summarised our conclusions and provided links to some alternative views.

Although it is nearly four years old, nothing we have read since has withdrawn or re-drawn any of this major report, which continues to provide a key focus of EU activity.

Five Presidents Report  (30/05/2016)

The next five posts under this theme form a set in which we analysed a collection of EU documents. We opened the first of these posts with this: “We have prepared an extensive review of EU documents to show just how deep-rooted is the ideology of supra-nationalism and how deceitful are the processes leading inexorably to its achievement.” The list of (11) source documents can be found here [Sources Summary and Posts v2.0] and an extensive commentary (ours) here [Sources of Evidence].

This post focuses on the EU’s expectation that the Court of Justice of the European Union(CJEU, otherwise ECJ) will continue to oversee significant aspects of Britain’s future.

Overtime Lords  (14/09/2017)

The next post focused on the gap between the EU’s claim to be democratic and the reality of its political agenda. We summed it up thus: ‘democracy’ as used in the EU seems to amount to talking among themselves. Citizens are not addressed.We extended the discussion in further posts, which will form another theme titled Democracy.

Democracy or Institutional Strengthening?  (18/09/2017)

The third of the five posts focused on the ideology that has underpinned the EU since its inception nearly 100 years ago. The ideology (the aim to forge a single, uniform eu-nationality) accounts for the rigidity of the treaties, the irreversibility of legislation, and the gap between the claims the EU and its leaders make on its behalf and the reality for most of its citizens.

Ideology  (22/09/2017)

Next we looked at some of the ways in which the EU hides its true agenda (and ideology) and why we believed (and still believe) that the EU is manipulating fact and opinion and is at risk of being found out. We concluded that where the EU is not successful it believes the fault is with the member states for not converging enough; this is used to justify the underlying ideology towards political union, which is what the EU is really about.

Propaganda, Deceits and Lies  (02/10/2017)

The next post in this series of five focused on the Brexit negotiations and why we believed that while the UK was negotiating the EU was not; it had (and still has) a different agenda.

From the draft negotiating guidelines we argued that there was no reason to claim that a non-member should have general “rights and responsibilities” other than those specified in any agreement with the EU. And the demand for “a level-playing field” hinted at the expectation that the UK would remain under the jurisdiction of the ECJ, which would then be able to control and limit the UK’s opportunities as an independent nation, for example with regard to the expected harmonisation of tax regimes.Both of these were confirmed in the Withdrawal Agreement that concluded the negotiations and was signed by the European Council and the UK Government but then roundly rejected by the UK Parliament (see the next post).

Negotiations  (05/10/2017)

We searched the 585 pages of the draft Withdrawal Agreement trying to understand whether or not this Leave meant Leave, as our Prime Minister told us, or something else. We quoted liberally from the draft to back up our claim that the ‘Agreement’ did not amount to a withdrawal, any more that a prisoner being escorted to the guillotine has been released from prison. Our post was linked to a more extensive analysis from which we drew the conclusion that the proposed Withdrawal Agreement would not see the United Kingdom exiting the European Union but moving to a new, and inferior, status under the thumb of the Union (a colony, as even some eurocrats have gloated).

Draft Withdrawal Agreement: a Fatal Flaw  (04/12/2018)