Douglas Carswell's Blog

Fiscal union? Do the maths

Standard and Poor's, the ratings agency, has warned that the credit worthiness of six euro nations could be downgraded.

The "inexorable logic of monetary union" - about which our Chancellor spoke recently - seems to be to  punish prudent member states and bailout the bad.  Yet again, the EU manages to export failure from one member state to the next.

Before deciding to go all gooey-eyed over the prospect of a full-blow Eurozone fiscal union, I hope someone in the Treasury did a bit of basic maths?  “You take the balance of the creditor countries, like Germany and Finland. Then subtract the debts of the debtor ones like Greece, Italy, Spain ... and you get ... oooops.” 

Not quite so logical, is it?  Suddenly it doesn’t quite add up the way it was spun in the media, does it? 

What about the even simpler calculation about the consequences of fiscal fusion on our own relationship with Europe? “You take 17 Euro bloc votes, add them up to a Qualified Majority ..... and it equals an end to Britain’s chances of vetoing anything coming out of Brussels ever again. Oooops”

I suspect that in neither instance had anyone actually done even those cursory calculations before announcing our policy.

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