From the ever confused and deceitful pages of the EU-supporting Daily Mail – the paper that quietly declared way down in a long editorial, ‘Let the Mail lay all its cards on the table. This paper has no desire for Britain to pull out of Europe’ – we have yet another bit of supposed red meat tossed to EUsceptics to keep them at bay.
Irrespective of the reality about trivialities such as how these things work, who has the ability to convene them, when they can be called and how items are accepted onto the agenda, the Mail reports the latest from Europlastic HQ to quiet the maddening crowd and give the illusion that something of substance is being done.
Next week, a group of Tories will unveil their own blueprint for reform of Britain’s relationship with Europe.
Andrea Leadsom, Chris Heaton-Harris and Tim Loughton, from the Fresh Start Project, have identified at least five major changes to EU treaties they say should be at the heart of Britain’s renegotiation.
They include reforms to protect our financial services industry and an end to limits on work hours. Tory Eurosceptics also want reforms to energy policy, the common agricultural policy, defence and immigration.
Add in to this renegotiation mix other ‘demands’ including limits on EU migrants who claim benefits in Britain, and the right to stop making payments such as child benefit, to the dependent children of migrant workers – and the Mail’s self delusion that this ‘move’ comes only after a poll for the Mail identified deep public anxiety about the ending of transitionary immigration restrictions on new EU members Romania and Bulgaria in January – and we have all the ingredients for a special episode of Fantasy Island.
Let’s not forget of course the shallow commitment to an in-out referendum sometime in 2017 that keeps being floated to keep the unruly peasants in their hovels, something that is almost certainly not going to happen because the EU will be in the midst of a new treaty negotiation to shore up the Eurozone and provide the EU with direct taxation powers to help with its revenue vs spending shortfall.
I’m only surprised we haven’t seen Osborne Tattoo running for his bell shouting ‘De Plane!! De Plane!!’
[Many will be pleased to know blogging will be light to non existant this weekend – lots on at Mind Towers]
Autonomous Mind 
This is just deception & playing for time. The EU won’t permit this, not even after many years of painful negotiation – let alone within the 3 to 4 years before the Tories’ very unconvincingly promised 2017 referendum. The only way to speed things up & have a cat in hell’s chance of any success at all in any negotiations with the EU would be after invoking Article 50. And that’s something the present government just won’t do. These falsehoods won’t deceive anyone for much longer.
FL. I think you are right. None of the 3 main political parties will offer a referendum in reality. As you say, the Tories are stalling, and in any case a return of DC as PM is extremely unlikely, so his much trumpeted “referendum” is unlikely to emerge after a GE in 2015.
No hope there then, and so that only leaves UKIP does it not?
Perhaps in the final analysis it will be the break up of the Eurozone and subsequent collapse of the EU itself which may well be the actual scenario at some point.
Meanwhile let us hope that the HA 6 demands gain traction as more people despair of ou broken political system.
Like many others I too believe the only hope of an exit from the EU will be the break of the EU itself, particularly the Eurozone, nothing any of our elected elite may do or say. Too many like Clegg have a vested interest. Too much sovereignty has been signed away; leaving the UK too deeply enmeshed in the EU to ever ‘negotiate’ an orderly withdrawal.
The politicos know only too well there can be no ‘renegotiation’ no ‘repatriation of powers’ but believe that by talking these issues up will neuter the UKIP effect and convince the electorate they are serious and mean business. Cameron will have nothing to ‘offer’ in his ‘Referendum’, no new deal, nothing to vote on. He is on record as wanting to stay in the EU so will not hold a straight In/Out Referendum.
One only has to look at the various Parliamentary Committee Hearings we have seen over the past 12 months to see all the ‘hot air’ expended in Wasteminster as MPs to sound off, feel important and pretend they are making a difference. Yet, does anything ever change?
Even the corporates do not take these hearings seriously and send their minions along to get an earbashing safe in the knowledge nothing will change.
It will be for others, the Greeks, Portugese, Spaniards and the French to take to the streets to protest, to force their national governments to change, to bring about the downfall of the EU.
Regrettably, too many will continue to vote LibLabCon. Mary Ellen Synon is quite corrrect when she says:
“What you can do about it – well, that is up to you. You can either be disgraced as a nation, or you can fight. I am sorry to have to say it on the eve of your Remembrance Sunday, but I see little fight left in most British.”
Some basic points are persistently pushed into the background and overlooked.
The relationship we have with the EU is that we are members and membership implies going along with its fundamental purpose and outlook. The purpose of the EU is to create a Europe-wide supra-national government and it’s never deviated from that. The principle it’s applied is that of ‘the ratchet’, the Aquis Communautaire, where once powers are ceded to Brussels by the nation states, they are never returned.
The only significantly different relationship the UK can have with the EU is not to be members and not to subscribe to the fundamental objective.
The EU is not the product of a trading arrangement which went wrong and became political; it’s objectives were always political. By addressing it only in economic terms, a huge deception has been perpetrated.
The reason we are members of the EU is that the British government (not just the major parties) want us to be. If they didn’t want us to be, we would be out or in our way out. Unfortunately for them, they are having to drag along a not entirely enthusiastic populace, and they haven’t scrupled to lie and take high-handed action to do that. The current discontent with the EU and the clamouring for a referendum is a problem to be managed and they will do their damnedest to manage it so that we stay in.