Douglas Carswell's Blog

Government backs United States of Europe

So which is it to be?

A) A full fiscal European Union, with Eurozone bonds, a common tax and spend policy, and national budgets okayed in Brussels? Or

B) An orderly end to the Euro?

Today it seems the position of HMG is to back the former. A decade ago, we Tories criticised the Euro for being a "burning building with no exits". Today we join the crowd of technocrats gathering in Brussels to formally seal off any fire escapes.

Thus does a British Conservative administration come to support a United States of Europe.

"But we're outside it" they'll say. "Don't you see? This will loosen our ties".

Nonsense. Just look at the outcome of the past year or so of deal-making; agreement to subject ourselves to pan-EU economic governance. A treaty change conceded in return for precisely nothing. Joining in bailouts to prop up a currency we're not even part of. Open-ended Eurozone liabilities until 2013. Massive hikes in our budget contribution.

Would you back any of those deals if they had been done by a Labour government? Each one of them was proposed first when Labour held office - but then concluded and finalised by the current administration. Long is the list of Coalition policies inherited from the previous administration.

There is nothing in any of these dreadful deals that give me any confidence we will not get drawn in, slowly but surely, to the fiscal union we now appear to be actively supporting.

The pity is that a fiscal union, being as it is the ultimate kind of bailout, isn't actually going to solve the debt problem, merely repackage it onto the shoulders of the taxpayer. How extraordinary that those who decide these things cannot seem to see it.

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