Interesting article.

Brussels has broken our power to rule

The EU has become a lumbering, unaccountable mess, says Christopher Booker.

The latest findings of Eurobarometer, the EU’s own polling organisation, show that less than half its citizens now believe it is a “good thing”. In many countries, its popularity is at record lows, and only 19 per cent see the EU as “democratic” (in Britain, Finland and Latvia this is as low as 10 per cent).

What makes this particularly ironic is that in 2001 the EU’s leaders issued their Laeken Declaration, admitting that the EU faced a crisis through its “democratic deficit”. Their remedy was the process designed to give Europe a “constitution”. After eight years of negotiation, obfuscation, lies and referendum-reverses, they got the constitution they wanted (although they had to disguise it as the Lisbon Treaty). The upshot of this tortuous attempt to “bring Europe closer to its peoples” is that those peoples see the EU as less democratic than ever.

Meanwhile, armed with its new powers, the inflated engine of our EU government rolls on, more power-crazed than ever. It is spending £800 million on setting up its new worldwide diplomatic service, with 100 of its officials earning more than our own shrunken and virtually irrelevant Foreign Secretary William Hague. Also now on the table are the EU’s options for imposing its own taxes, the front-runner being a tax on financial transactions to which Britain, as a world financial centre, would contribute 70 per cent, more than 300 billion euros a year. Britain and the City will also be hit hardest by the EU’s seizure of control over the regulation of financial services.

Our Chancellor, George Osborne, has just conceded the EU’s right to “supervise” the contents of national budgets, taking away much of a power Parliament has exercised for centuries. Britain also seems likely to lose what remains of the EU budget rebate won by Mrs Thatcher, putting up our yearly contributions to the EU by another £3 billion - even though, for every £1 we get back from Brussels for our farmers, we already hand over £2 to farmers in other countries.

Theresa May, our Home Secretary, weakly claims that she wants reform of the European Arrest Warrant, when half of all those affected by it are being extradited from Britain. The EU’s response, in effect, is that we agreed to this travesty of justice and we must learn to live with it.

But no current issue better illustrates the bizarre nature of the system to which we have surrendered the power to run our country than the chaos inflicted on our hospitals by the enforced application of the EU’s working time directive. Led by John Black, head of the Royal College of Surgeons, medical professionals protest that this is threatening many patients’ lives.

Even the European Commission freely admits, in a recent “communication” to the European Parliament and sundry others, that its rules are, in practice, highly “unsatisfactory” and in need of urgent reform. But it adds that attempts to amend the directives have been going on since 2004 and that any chance of getting the reforms needed will involve so many consultations and negotiations that little is likely to happen for years.

Of course, if we still had the power to run our own country, this crisis in the NHS and much else besides could be sorted out within months, But since our Government seems quite happy to continue handing over even more powers to this crazy system, there is nothing we can do about it – until eventually the whole lumbering, labyrinthine, unaccountable, undemocratic mess implodes under the weight of its own contradictions.

Comment:

What a chick**sh*t response from the media ("Brussels has broken our power to rule").

Seems to me that the media projects a certain mindset and the sheeple accept it, carte blanc.

My advice to the British and the rest of those herded (without consent) into the E.U. "Grow some B*lls!!!"

Good Luck to all!