Sunday, May 16, 2010

Osborne gives in on first EU trial

It appears that despite the Tories pretending they have any interests of protecting British interests in Europe, he's going to cave in at the first hurdle.

Some years back I wrote about proposals in the European Parliament to limit Hedge Funds which a socialist MEP Joe Leinen said were an ‘alien concept in Europe.’ Presumably, this is because they make money and are lightly regulated.

The proposals also caused Boris Johnson to go to Brussels to try lobby against this directive, without of course realising that his own MEPs had voted in favour of it at the first reading in the European Parliament which is the only chance a proposal can be thrown out.

Sources close to the new Chancellor of the Exchequer said that although the British Government still disagreed with large parts of the directive, the process was now too far down the track to be stopped.

“We know we have to pick our battles and this was one we had already lost,” one source said.

This is the nonsense about being in the European Union; that we have to 'pick our battles'.

Fuck that, we should trust our politicians to do what's best for the country all the time and that is why it's a fallacy that being a member of the EU is anything but undemocractic and disastrous for this country.

The City is vital to the long term financial interests of this country and by passing a directive which will see Hedge Funds vanish abroad hardly stands up this argument that our new Beloved Prime Minister and his predecessor used to say that our membership is necessary for 3 million jobs.

That was based on the number of people who work in sectors which export to the EU as if somehow over night all the countries in the EU will wish to cut off their noses to spite their faces and stick two fingers up to their biggest clients.

I hardly think that the regulation of car windscreen wipers is a requirement for multinational trading deals in billion pound industries and more to do with the level of intellect and scope that most MEPs are capable of.

ID cards may be scrapped in the immediate future but given that we're still grabbing our ankles for the EU monster I fail to see how this coalition government is going to be wildly different.

2 comments:

Idle Pen Pusher said...

Quite.

Boggart Blogger said...

What we need to do in our relationship as our politicians are not going to bring us out any time soon is learn the French trick of accepting the rule "in principle" but deferring implementation indefinitely.

Then we just sit back and watch the slow motion train wreck than the unravelling of the EU will be,