Lord Elpers wrote:
No I don't mean what you choose to think I mean. I stated IMO that the single currency is doomed and have consistently felt so from the start. The EU politicians have been "busily" trying to correct the mistakes for several years now, in Kanute like fashion, and they will not do it because it is has already failed with hugely damaging results. It has dragged the whole EU down and it has brought real austerity to half of the Eurozone which the public are now rejecting. Eg Italy.
There were two big mistakes that led to this particular problem.
The first was introducing the Euro before fiscal union (belatedly being addressed).
The second was allowing Greece to join the Euro.
The Euro is not inevitably doomed.
If this dreadful hiatus can be overcome, the Euro will be one of the strongest and most trusted currencies.
Considering its difficulties, it’s not doing bad in the markets, is it?
Lord Elpers wrote:
The new party is at pains to stress that although it is anti-euro it is not anti-EU. Lucke also said his natural allies in Britain are the Conservatives and not UKIP. His party wants reform of Europs´s institutions along the lines advocated by David Cameron "We're fully supportive of Cameron's concept of repatriating powers from Brussels" he said.
I stand by what I said before on this bit…i.e. they don’t know which powers he wants to repatriate because he has (probably deliberately) stopped short of a definitive list.
Personally, I think that he will be pushing at an open door because there won’t be much to his demands … e.g ending the travel involved in holding Plenary sessions in Strasbourg … wasteful but, frankly, just peanuts, useful as a bargaining counter that’s all.
Also, for the repatriations of powers, check out “subsidiarity”, agreed in (I think) the Maastricht treaty, where any powers that can be better executed at a country level, should and will be executed at country level.
The mechanism already exists, root and branch reform is not needed, such repatriations can be handled, if agreement is reached.
The new party is a single-issue party and, in that sense, has more in common with UKIP.
Lord Elpers wrote:
Your Eurofile tendencies have blinded you to the reality the the EU needs major reform. It is not working, it has become bloated with burocrats and regulations that have made the EU uncompetitive.
I am indeed a Europhile (and, for that matter, a Federalist) but, in my opinion, there are definitely parts that need reform and I have said so on this very forum before.
Number one in that category is the CAP.
But your bit about being bloated with bureaucrats and regulations leading to uncompetitiveness is plain wrong. The EU actually got rid of tens of thousands of complex, arcane and often-conflicting import rules and tariffs that individual countries had before, making it much easier for member states to import and export both intra-EU and extra-EU. Not only that but it did it pre-deadline and under-budget.
If you compare EU bureaucracy against, say, our own in Whitehall etc, the EU bureaucracy is tiny, whether you compare in %age terms or empirical.
Lord Elpers wrote:
There you go again. Please do not put words in my mouth. Germany was very keen for the membership to increase because of its exports could be financed. At the same time the leading EU countries took a very relaxed view of whether countries like Greece fullfilled the membership criteria. You can form your own conclusions.
I have.
And it doesn’t conclude that Greece were allowed to join so that they’d buy German submarines.
