Unacceptable accounting
The European Court of Auditors has refused to sign off EU accounts for the 16th consecutive year. Yet the European Parliament voted to increase the EU budget for 2011 by 5.9 per cent to £114.4 billion next year. We will give £15.67 billion.
Cameron said he opposed the increase, but more significantly backed the EU’s recent decision to create “a new legal framework…applying to all EU member states”. This gives the EU the powers of an all-Europe economic government. Britain’s budget will become EU business.
Cap? What cap?
The EU is negotiating with India to let unlimited numbers of Indian IT workers, engineers and managers come to work here for three years, whether or not British workers could do those jobs. There are already tens of thousands of Indian IT staff working in Britain, and 48,000 unemployed British IT specialists.
Cameron told the CBI that the government will not stop companies attracting the best talent from wherever it comes. His promise to cut migration from more than 200,000 a year to “tens of thousands” is hollow rhetoric.
They were warned
Morgan Kelly, Professor of Economics at University College Dublin, argued on 8 November, “By [2011] Ireland will have run out of cash, and the terms of a formal bailout will have to be agreed… On these terms hangs our future as a nation.” He did not anticipate how rapidly that would happen; the Irish government applied for EU/IMF support on 21 November. Bail-out terms were agreed by 22 November.
Kelly concluded, “Sovereign nations get to make policy choices, and we are no longer a sovereign nation in any meaningful sense of that term.”
Preparing for failure
The EU has set up a 440 billion bailout euro fund to prop up banks holding eurozone public and commercial debt. The British government has volunteered to pay £7 billion to Ireland’s banks as our share, while British banks hold £140 billion of Irish debt.