The vice tightens

This is an arcane subject, agreed, but the passage of the Corbett report through Committee - or should I say non passage of the report through Committee will, when the history is written be recognised as one of the building blocks of the centralised United States of Europe so fanatically desired by the Euro-Nationalists.

Andrew Duff, the leader of the Liberal Democrats has a thoughtful piece in the FT on the subject, in which he states that MEP,

"voted to ensure that two of the current party groups cannot survive, at least in their present form, after next June’s elections. In a vote of 481 to 203, with 26 abstentions, parliament decided to raise the threshold needed to form a group. At the moment, a political group needs at least 20 MEPs from six of the EU’s 27 member states. From next July, a group will need 25 MEPs from seven countries...

"One wonders if all the consequences of raising the party threshold are thoroughly thought through. The two groups prospectively disbanded are the Union for Europe of the Nations (UEN) and Independency/Democracy (ID). The rightist UEN has 43 members drawn from only six countries, including Ireland’s ruling Fianna Fail party, Poland’s Law and Justice party (of the Kaczynski twins), and Italy’s Alleanza Nazionale (of Gianfranco Fini). Although of nine nationalities, the 22 members of the nationalistic ID are heavily dependent on the stability, political and otherwise, of the UK Independence Party. If refugees from the dissolved UEN and ID are to be forced reluctantly into the surviving larger groups they will only add to the incoherence of their inevitably nervous hosts.

If, however, they are discarded to swell the ranks of M Le Pen’s ‘non-attached’, they will only add to the inefficiency of the House. The sub-plot of this story is the commitment of British Tory leader David Cameron to divorce his MEPs in the next parliament from their association with the federalist EPP. In order to form a new group, the Conservatives will now need allies from six other states. They will not find them in the Irish members of the UEN who are looking to join one of the mainstream pro-European (and explicitly pro-Lisbon treaty) parties – probably the Liberals. Nor will the Tories find allies in the Alleanza Nazionale who, at the behest of Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi, are set to join the EPP"...

"The likelihood of a Tory government in Britain is beginning to alarm Bussels. As the Labour party declines, it becomes ever more urgent to have the Lisbon treaty in force before Mr Cameron gets to Number Ten. Amid the after-shock of the Irish referendum, not enough significance has been given to Britain’s U-turn on Europe. Whereas in 2005 Tony Blair limped apologetically behind France and the Netherlands in rejecting the constitutional treaty, Gordon Brown deserves much credit for ratifying Lisbon even after the Irish ‘No’.

Yet nobody is betting that Britain’s new engagement with Europe will last log. In Strasbourg, President Sarkozy was as encouraging as he could be: ‘Europe needs the United Kingdom’, he said. ‘If Britain has one foot in and one foot out, Europe is weakened’".

They might be worrioed about Cameron, but will be far more worried when UKIP increase both their vote share and their representation in the European Parliament. Britain is not happy, and is beggining to realise that,all things being considered,it would be Better Off Out.
>