The Campus Soap Box
Alex Rose, Chair of York Tories
Here’s a thought: by the time the next issue of Nouse is published, an average of £258 million pounds - enough to pay for the yearly salaries of over 15,000 N.H.S nurses - will have been illegally siphoned off the European Union’s budget, according to an Ernst and Young audit from 2004. Or, put simply, £25,000 by the time you have read this column.
Indeed, this is hardly surprising, given that the E.U’s own Court of Auditors have rejected the budget owing to financial irregularities for the past eleven consecutive years. However, don’t just take my word for it: if you log onto the E.U’s website (www.eurpopa.eu.int), entry number twenty-one under the heading ‘what the European Union does’ actually states ‘fraud’!
In this respect, the best example of the E.U’s ‘financial probity’ regards the case of Commissioner Edith Cresson. Apart from suffering the unfortunate handicap of being French, it transpired that the former Premier had been awarding governmental contracts to her dentist, Rene Berthelot. Naturally, Monsieur Berthelot was totally unqualified for such work, being more accustomed to removing people’s teeth; nonetheless, he was paid £125,000. Rather like my dissertation, it seems that his work was not up to scratch, and no-one could find any evidence that he had actually done anything productive.
Moreover, apart from being an Aegean Stables of fraud, corruption and embezzlement, the E.U manages to combine the worst elements of two political creeds: socialism and authoritarianism, culminating in a bossy, ‘one size fits all’ approach.
For example, the E.U had the audacity to evoke the new powers outlined in the European Constitution immediately, several months before the forthcoming referenda. In doing so, it violated the sacrosanct principle of democracy - that people confer power upon the government, not the other way around.
Consequently, the Constitution was rejected by the French and the Dutch voters, but that did not stop one Commissioner from uttering perhaps the most ridiculous remark in recent political history: ‘there are some who want to return to the old intergovernmental way of doing things. To those I say come to Terezin [a Nazi concentration camp] and see where that old road leads.’ Apparently, therefore, anyone who believes in accountability and financial probity is a raving Nazi; God only knows the sort of judgment reserved for unelected, second-rate politicians with no appreciation or understanding of democracy and no respect for European history.
Ultimately, there are no doubt those who will insist that we can work from within the E.U to reform it. To be honest, King Canute had a better chance with the tide; Great Britain’s influence constitutes just 29 votes out of 321 in the Council of Ministers. If any further evidence were needed, consider the following words of Romano Prodi following his appointment in 2001 as President of the E.U Commission: ‘I have executive powers, for which there is no other name in the world, whether you like it or not, than government.’
How do you vote out an unelected President
