EU schizophrenia
(Filed: 29/10/2005)
Telegraph
London
Tony Blair was in Hampton Court this week talking, as usual, about economic reform. Listening to him, you might easily have got the idea that the EU was streamlining and deregulating. So it comes as quite a shock to look at the budget that Brussels has just passed. For all the Prime Minister's high-tech rhetoric, the EU plans to fire-hose money at the most corrupt, expensive, wasteful and immoral system of farm support on Earth.
The CAP will account for 42 per cent of its spending in 2006, with a further 37 per cent going on structural fund boondoggles. Brussels will spend most of what is left on administering itself - although it is, to be fair, proposing one saving: it wants to cut the budget of the anti-fraud office!!
There are, in truth, two EUs. In the official EU - the EU of commission press statements and council communiqués and Mr Blair's speeches - thousands of "unnecessary" regulations are to be scrapped. Back in the real EU, on the very day that the commission was making this announcement, MEPs were passing a law to do with circuses and another about eels.
The virtual EU is on track to be "the most dynamic economy in the world by 2010"; the real EU is creating almost no private sector jobs. The virtual EU is a sponsor of freedom worldwide; the real EU is collaborating with Beijing on weapons systems. The virtual EU listens to voters; the real EU has just allocated nine million euros to a campaign in favour of the constitution [even though the constitution has been rubbished in both France and Holland-only a few short months ago.]
Not that this will especially bother the Prime Minister. In Brussels, as at home, he evinces an eerie belief that speeches and soundbites define, rather than describe, the world. It is as though, like Descartes' malicious demon, he can control our reality by manipulating our senses. The trouble is that the gap between the official version of events and our daily experience is now reaching almost Eastern bloc dimensions. This cannot go on for much longer.
telegraph.co.uk