Books for Prep | |
 - Well researched but too selectively reportedA 600+ page, heavily footnoted polemic against the European Union, and particularly Britain's EU membership. While I share the authors' general view about the EU, I found the book ultimately unconvincing. Part of the problem is just that there's too much of the negative here. The way the authors tell it, there are seemingly no benefits whatsoever to Britain being part of the EU - and that's just not credible. Britain must be getting something out of it (even if not enough, on balance) otherwise why would each of the major political parties support its continued membership? The authors could present the evidence on both sides and then argue why the negative outweighs the positive, but they don't, and the end result is that I wonder what they left out and why. And there are other reasons to question their credibility. On the few occasions they have to mention the Balkan Wars, their references are almost comically one-sided. They offer an out-and-out falsehood to explain why the Irish people ultimately supported the Nice Treaty. And they refer to an avowedly anti-immigration pressure group merely as a "specialist thinktank" when citing a rather apocalyptic prediction it makes about Britain being flooded by migrants. Amusingly, for all the authors' expressions of distaste for "supranationalism", it never seems to click with them that the country they feel so passionately about is itself a supranational state ... and nor, of course, does the irony even occur to them that they are so fiercely defending the sovereignty of a country which has denied the same to so many others. The EU deserves criticism and the European people need books written from this perspective. Pity this isn't a better one. Rating:  - One of the best books ever written on the EUThis is a new edition of the authors' 2003 classic history of the European Union from its origins immediately after the First World War to the present. They show that the EU is not about sharing or cooperation between sovereign governments. It is not inter-governmental, but supranational. The dividing line is the veto: where there are vetoes, there is still inter-governmentalism, still independent, sovereign nations; with vetoes gone, there is only a new, supranational form of government beyond all democratic control. Governments and parliaments are left in place, but are subordinated to the EU. The EU's founder Jean Monnet described the EU's method: "Europe's nations should be guided towards a super state without their people understanding what is happening. This can be accomplished by successive steps each disguised as having an economic purpose, but which will eventually and irreversibly lead to federation." The single currency was the most important of these steps: as Monnet said, "Via money Europe could become political in five years." Giuliano Amato, Vice-President of the Convention that drew up the EU Constitution, said, "In Europe one needs to act `as if' - as if what was wanted was little, in order to obtain much, as if States were to remain sovereign to convince them to concede sovereignty ... The Commission in Brussels, for example, should act as if it were a technical instrument, in order to be able to be treated as a government. And so on by disguise and subterfuge." How has EU membership affected Britain? Our industries have become expendable. For example, when we entered the EEC, a senior civil servant in the Scottish fisheries department advised ministers not to go into any detail on the damage caused to the fishing industry: "The more one is drawn into such explanations, the more difficult it is to avoid exposing the weaknesses of the inshore fisheries position, the only answer to which may be that in the wider context they must be regarded as expendable." We do not need the EU. The National Institute for Economic and Social Research found that withdrawing from the EU would not lose us jobs. The Independent reported this as, `8 million jobs could be lost if Britain quits EU' (18 February 2000). The NIESR's director, Dr Martin Weale, described the report as "absurd ... pure Goebbels. In many years of academic research I cannot recall such a wilful distortion of the facts." Subsequently, Gordon Brown claimed, "750,000 British companies export from Britain to Europe": the government's own figure was 18,000. The EU has created a system of agencies, over-ministries, which are already directing national governments and civil servants: Europol, Eurojust, the European Human Rights Agency, the European Fisheries Agency, the European Railways Agency, the European Chemicals Agency, the European Aviation Safety Agency, the European Maritime Safety Agency, the European Environment Agency, the European Food Safety Authority, the European Health Protection Agency, the European Health and Safety Agency and the European Defence Agency. The EU Constitution was designed to give these bodies legal authority, but the EU carries on regardless of the French and Dutch peoples' rejection of the Constitution. A leading military journal, DefenceNews, said, "voters cannot so easily put the brakes on destiny." The head of the European Parliament's defence sub-committee, Karl von Wogau, said, "I am not discouraged for the European Security and Defence Policy because it has its own fixed agenda and that will move ahead even if the constitution is not in place." As Jean-Claude Juncker, President of the European Council, said, "If it's a Yes we will say `on we go', and if it's a No we will say `we continue.'" The authors tell us about the EU-wide network of academics who propagandise against their nations, on behalf of the EU, the 491 Jean Monnet professors, 102 in British universities. The `Jean Monnet Project' co-finances 2,319 teaching schemes in universities to `promote European integration'. The British working class's resolute hostility to the euro defeated that EU attack. The EU's rulers and their quislings still want to impose their Constitution. We must respond by demanding that we leave the EU, to save all the EU member nations' national interests, our democracy, and our sovereign independence, our right to govern ourselves. page 1 of 1
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