eurealist.co.uk

If like me you are Cap novice and do not understand the ins the outs, a really good state of present play is available Eureferendum. What are Brown and Blair doing linking CAP funding with their latest cause celèbre, poverty in Africa, demanding that the EU’s agriculture policy be abolished in its entirety.

A knowing Richard North takes a run through the CAP related headlines and puts them in perspective showing how by upping the anti Blair has wrong footed the Conservatives at home and taken the moral high ground, seriously upsetting the French into the bargain.

Blair has played a blinder, which is leaving the opposition, at home and abroad, floundering.

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PLEASE COME TO PROTEST OUTSIDE THEIR NEXT MEETING AT

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Showing a little realism Tony Blair has said that it is up to France and the Netherlands to decide on whether they can ratify the EU Constitution. “The EU constitution depends on a change in the French and Dutch positions, so in a sense it is for them to come forward and say how this can be done before we can really know how that moves on,”

Despite all the arguments about continuing the ratification process, Blair is right, if at the end of the day France and Holland do not state clearly what moves they will take to reverse their respective referendums the constitution can not come into force.

It would now be nice if Blair were to also say that until such a plan is forthcoming from France and Holland that the anticipated application of parts of the Constitution should cease. But pigs might well be flying over Whitehall before the obvious implications of the rejection of the constitution are taken on board by Blair and Co.

Anatole Kaletsky in the Times suggests that Blair has the opportunity enjoyed by no other British leader, at least since the Second World War. The question is how he can play the strong hand that fate has dealt him.

Simple really “Mr Blair can start by explaining why the EU constitution has failed. The voters of France and the Netherlands did not reject the principle of a constitution. What they voted against was the particular constitution offered by the EU’s governing elite. The reasons for this rejection are clear. The proposed constitution would have reinforced and then entrenched forever the worst features of the EU status quo: lack of democracy, excessive centralisation and economic dysfunction.”

Kaletsky says “These are the three great evils that Mr Blair must now try to overcome”

“Mr Blair’s challenge is to recognise such concepts and use them to redefine the “European project”. Instead of trying to create a homogenised euro-culture or single economic “model”, European countries should turn their inherent diversity to mutual advantage through economic competition and cultural exchange.

How could Mr Blair move Europe in this direction? By doing something unthinkable to Europe’s political classes, but blindingly obvious to voters: demanding the return of powers to nation governments from Brussels. In diplomatic jargon, he must start to unravel the acquis communautaire. The acquis is a convention that asserts that any responsibility transferred to Brussels can never be renationalised. It guarantees an irreversible accretion of power to the EU. Mr Blair should, as a matter of principle, announce his opposition to this anti-democratic juggernaut. He should show what he means in practice by proposing repatriation of specific policies, starting with issues such as regulations on working time and consumer protection, but aiming eventually for the biggest and most expensive policy — agriculture.

Even more important than disavowing the acquis, Mr Blair could emphasise the diversity of Europe by rejecting the concept of a single economic model to be followed by every EU country. The EU’s official economic policy (known as the Lisbon Agenda) is to create “the world’s most competitive economy by 2010”. This objective is not just embarrassingly unattainable, but deeply misguided. Europe is not a single economy. It is a single market; a community of democratic nations, whose citizens choose different economic and social priorities.”

In fact all Mr Blair has to do is to dismantle the EU and start again, I am quite sure that this will go down like the proverbial lead balloon in the halls of Brussels, and those who have spent the last fifty years taking the EU in exactly the opposite direction will welcome with open arms the destruction of the European dream.

Letters from the Telegraph on ID Cards

Sir - “Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves” (William Pitt, 1783).

Rodney McGough, Harrogate, N Yorks

Sir - We are told that it is possible to track by satellite millions of cars and the distances they travel, and compute bills for each. It must be a small step to link ID cards to the satellite, to eliminate not only terrorism but also tax fraud.

David Brookman, Old Woodhouse, Leics

Sir - At an EU summit in Lisbon in April 2000, member states signed up to the “e-Europe Smart Cards Charter”. In October 2001 the EU Police Chiefs Task Force urged that “the EU should speed up the universal adoption of ID cards”.

We could have our movements and lifestyles tracked through the introduction of EU ID-cards, with the EU Galileo satellite system tracking motorists, via the EU Common Transport Policy. Yet Brussels makes unelected EU commissioners, members of its own police force Europol and other officials immune from criminal prosecution.

Mrs Val Cowell, Poulton-le-Fylde, Lancs

Sir - I am surprised the Government hasn’t proposed tattooing everyone with a number. More sophisticated would be an implanted chip such as my dog has -much cheaper than biometric ID cards.

Robert Roalfe, Wilmslow, Cheshire

Sir - We were denied a referendum to vote No to the new EU constitution. Perhaps Mr Blair could be persuaded to hold one for ID cards. He’d find out what people think before vast sums of our money are wasted on another crackpot scheme.

Trevor Jones, Corringham, Essex

Boris Johnson in the Telegraph questions the amazing indulgence we show - now that communism is meant to be dead - to commies, socialists and Lefty tyrants of all kinds.

Remind me: who was the greater mass murderer, Stalin or Hitler? Well, Stalin is thought to have been responsible for about 50 million deaths, and Hitler for a mere 25 million. What Hitler did in his concentration camps was equalled if not exceeded in foulness by the Soviet gulags, forced starvation and pogroms. What makes the achievements of communist Russia so special and different, that you can simper around in a CCCP T-shirt, while anyone demented enough to wear anything commemorating the Third Reich would be speedily banged away under the 1986 Public Order Act?

I do not say that we are wrong in hounding these relics of fascism; my point is that we are curiously indifferent to the behaviour of their extreme Left-wing counterparts, and that in general the Left is able to get away with things that would otherwise be viewed as nauseating and shameful.

Why, to put it bluntly, is Labour allowed to get away with all this? Imagine the howls of hate, if a Conservative government had spent the past few weeks eroding the right to trial by jury, abolishing habeas corpus, curtailing free speech, and then slapped on the plastic poll tax - the ID card. Lefties are somehow assumed to be doing things for idealistic reasons, and for the collective good, and their high motives excuse their appalling solutions.

That is why the servants of communist tyranny get sympathetic obits, and modern British girls wear CCCP T-shirts, and that is why a Labour Government can enact a series of authoritarian measures that a Conservative government could not contemplate. I cannot explain this injustice: I merely point it out.

This fantastic post from The England Project tells us everthing that is wrong with the Tory party, and shows how far they have to go before we can begin to trust them again.

Here is just one example of what I hate about politicians. Tory stated policy is not to oppose ID cards as a matter of principle, indeed they have stated that they actually support them in principle. What they do oppose is the current government’s ID card scheme and they will continue to do so unless it is changed so that it can be favourably judged against five distinct tests.

That is all on the record and no statement has been forthcoming from the Tory party to withdraw from this position.

Then we see the following release from the badly named web site conservatives.com. It takes the form of a pledge by David Davis, the Tory Shadow Home Secretary, that a future Tory government would abandon Labour’s controversial ID card scheme. The release is filled with what looks like anti-ID card rhetoric.

….Mr Davis warned that the scheme would “chip away at the basic liberties we would have come to hold dear, and which previous generations fought to protect”.

…an incoming Conservative administration would abandon the legislation and scrap the ID card scheme, Mr Davis stressed: “We will not be the party of such a move. The Home Secretary’s proposals represent a fundamental shift in the balance of power between the citizen and the state.

And the marvellous closing paragraph …”They are not just excessive, but also expensive. Not just illiberal, but also impractical. Not just unnecessary, but also unworkable. A vision rather like this was originally set out by a man called Blair who later changed his name to Orwell and wrote a book called 1984. It was supposed to be a warning. This government has used it as a text book.”

All fine and dandy and all designed to fool everyone into thinking that they are speaking out against ID cards as a matter of principle. But don’t be fooled, they are not.

There has not been a single statement withdrawing the Tory line of support in principle. All the above release from David Davis has said is that they will abandon the Labour scheme. There is not a single promise (would that be worth anything) or commitment to do anything other than this but, I suspect, most people (including the media) will swallow the line that the Tory party is an anti-ID card party hook, line and sinker.

And that’s what I hate about politicians; the politics. They made a statement of support for the principle because they were concerned that opposing ID cards would turn out to be a vote looser. In order to be able to fight for a position distinct from the Labour party they put up certain conditions to their support allowing them room for manoeuvre should their judgement about public support turn out to be false. Now that it looks like there is trouble ahead for the Labour scheme they come out fully against it using rhetoric designed to look like they are anti-ID card when it is nothing of the sort.

It’s all completely unprincipled. They are giving no lessons in anything other than political manoeuvring and they are darkening the very heart of what it means to be a true conservative (or true socialist or true anything for that matter).

No member of the public has learnt anything about what benefits there might be in a smaller state. No member of the public has witnessing a principled stand by an opposition party that is a real advocate of individual liberty. There has been no real progress in the debate and there have been no converts to the ideals of individual liberty due to anything the Tory party has done.

A conservative party would have made a proper fight of it and many, many people could have had that spark of liberty inside of them turned into a brighter flame.

I hate how these quislings have behaved.