Douglas Carswell's Blog

Euro spin?

According to Patrick Hennessy writing in the Sunday Telegraph, the government's European Union Act, which has just come into force, means that "no further powers can be taken from Britain by Brussels without a referendum".

Alas, that is balls.

Since the Coalition came to power there have been a whole series of further transfers of power to Brussels. Brussels has taken control of City regulation, European Investigation Orders have taken effect, we have agreed to a system of pan-EU economic governance .... I could bang on.

Which of these transfers of power would have been prevented by this new European Union Act? Not a single one.

Worse, the government has already allowed precisely the sort of treaty change we are told would be impossible without a referendum, when ministers allowed the Eurozone block to go ahead and establish a permanent bailout mechanism. Extraordinarily, those doing the deal-making on our account failed to use the leverage we had to gain a single scrap of a concession in return.

If you're hoping for the government to use the turmoil in Euroland to negotiate a new, looser relationship with Brussels, the initial signs are not promising.

William Hague has a separate article in the Sunday Telegraph in which he sticks to his "in Europe, not governed by Europe" mantra - as if the Lisbon treaty had never happened.

He writes about the need for Britain to remain part of the EU, but to reform it. We need, he says, change to "help our economies grow" ... "bring the EU budget under control" ... cut back the "burden of EU regulations" and close the EU's "democratic deficit".

In other words, he says more or less what every minister sat inside the Foreign Office has been saying for the past 40 or so years. But it never happens.

The notion we can somehow turn the EU into being the kind of club we'd like it to be is twenty years out of date. The question now is when are we going to give the people, not the politicians, a vote to decide whether we pull out?

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