'Icebergs forrard purser?', 'Full steam ahead'

Remember this?

At times one almost has to feel pity for EU Commissioners. They are like salesmen for tape cassettes after the invention of the CD.

They have a product which everybody knows, is used to and in the past loved, but mow their are better options, more reliable and not nearly as liable to snarl up.


However ther job makes them say things they must know, when infront of their bathroom mirror are ridiculous. Their product is slowly dieing, the market is shrivelling, but they habve signed the contract and must keep on going out their trying to sell it to a world that has cottoned on that they are the past, and nothing, but nothing will ever bring the glory days back.

So it is with Commissioner Štefan Füle. He is quoted as saying,

the further expansion of the EU is a solution to the current “systematic” crisis in the EU

 He went on with his theme,

There are even politicians who have not had problems drawing lines between the current problems and expansion. That’s nonsense. Expansion is not part of the problem but a solution,”

He just doesn't get it. Those countries that want to join the EU do it for a number of reasons, not least the massive transfer of monies to them, which their taxpayers will not have to fund, and the ability to export large numbers of workers into places that have higher wages and thus reduce the cost to their own states of welfare provisions. Not something that the current populations of the EU are that happy about.

Of course this attitude of believing the impossible might stem from his personal hinterland,

Füle, 49, studied at the Charles University and the Moscow State Institute of International Relations, where many of the top functionaries of the Soviet Union’s European satellite states were educated. He was a member of Communist Party of Czechoslovakia from 1982 to 1989.

Communists were always good at believing in impossible things.